Image from the film Trait pour trait by Jean-Baptiste Chardin to Mélissa Pinon
| As part of its 40th edition, the International Festival of Films on Art receives the Louvre Museum and gives it carte blanche. |
| Natural allies in this common mission to increase the knowledge and appreciation of art among the public, FIFA and M worn out of the Louvre gather around two special screenings in the presence of Pascale Raynaud, responsible for cinema programming and the collection of films on art at the Louvre Museum. For her carte blanche, she selected the films of two independent directors, Julien Devaux and Filippos Koutsaftis, questioning the legacy of the past. The first questions the creative process of a young French painter, Mélissa Pinon, through her copy of a masterpiece of French painting: La Raie, by Chardin. The second is a documentary about the town of Eleusis, inhabited by the myth of Demeter. This small industrial town on the outskirts of Athens, which in ancient times hosted the rituals that introduced the ancient Greeks to the miracle of life and the approach of death, is now struggling to preserve its archaeological heritage. |
The Sad Stone de Filippos Koutsaftis
Grèce | 2000 | 1 h 25 min
“Why this film? Because it is quite rare for cinema to attach itself in this way to the depths of the earth. Quite rare that he attaches himself with such tenderness and obstinacy—twelve years of erratic but stubborn filming in the Site of Eleusis—to grasp what survives of mysteries passed, of buried cities, of lives fled. Filippos Koutsaftis thought of cinema as an art of survival, an archaeology in the full sense of the word. But archaeology is a battlefield, not just excavation. The filmmaker saw that the surviving things were at war with each other at every moment: surviving things to kill memory (petrochemical factories, asphalt over the Sacred Way), against which surviving beings struggle to give birth to something, as in this man who wanders among the stones and takes care of them like wounded children. All this guided by a phrasing of such simple images and words so deep that make this film a single great poem. »
– Georges Didi-Huberma
The Sad Stone has won many awards: that of the best documentary awarded by the Greek Ministry of Culture, the Audience Award, the Prize of the Association of Greek Critics, as well as that of Cinema Magazine at the 41st Thessaloniki International Film Festival.
Trait pour trait from Jean-Baptiste Chardin to Mélissa Pinon by Julien Devaux
France | 2012 | 52 min
Mélissa Pinon, painter, has, from her native Burgundy to Paris, built a modern figurative work that has already earned her recognition. In 2001, she met at the Louvre La Raie, one of Chardin’s most famous paintings. She then undertakes to make a copy… Through the eyes of Mélissa Pinon, a reflection is built on the value of imitation in the career of a painter. In short, how does one become a painter today?
With more than sixty selections in France and around the world, Trait pour trait received the 1st prize at the Ecrans du Réel (Le Mans, 2006), Special Mention at the Rencontres cinématographiques (Cerbère, 2006) and Special Mention 35th International Festival of Huesca (Spain, 2007).
