Module N°01, “Comme un seul homme”. from Denis Darzacq on Vimeo.
“Comme un seul homme” [As a single man] is a text written from the unpublished letters of French, English, and German soldiers, read by today’s youth visiting the battlegrounds of the Great War. Through their way of reciting it with enthusiasm, hesitation, indifference, obedience for the exercise, and deep commitment, they draw a portrait of a generation echoing those who, at the same age, were taken into the turmoil of combat.
The text was written by Fabrice Rozié from their letters, all translated into French. The words, which are extracts, find themselves unified beyond languages and boarders, without distinguishing among nations, generations, and men. From this point forward, there are no longer any winners or losers, just this common history that links us forever.
The “actors” were chosen amongst pupils from general and technical high schools and from students. Young people from Alsace, the North, and the Parisian Region, experiencing these places filled with history. Their bodies, their spirits, were confronted to the battlefields where the ravages of combat are still visibly engraved into the ground one century later.
They are twenty. Twenty youths from the 2010s who, facing the camera, read, hesitate, recite, get carried away, stumble over words, give up, start again. They struggle, they don’t understand, they mumble, they break out laughing. In their voice, the same text recounts the realities of the trenches, combat, fear, friendship, hunger, death, and faith for these young French, German, and English soldiers who were their age in 1914.
From one voice to another, from one face to another, words circulate.
As one single man.
Denis Darzacq filmed them on three major battle sites. They are different scenes, but they all resemble each other. Fog, earth, snow, trees, grassy plains, imprints of an exploded bomb at Vimy in la Somme, at Béthune in Artois, at Hartsmannwillerkopf in Alsace, and all at the same time.
Photographs of landscapes and portraits of trees accompany the video. The landscapes taken on the battlefields of the Great War in the North, in Alsace, and in Verdun read like blank music scores on which the voices from the video write the history of these places.
The portraits of trees, taken in the same places, are shown in a smaller format. They were conceived as possible incarnations of fallen soldiers. It is a way of paying tribute to the thousands of unknown soldiers forever buried in these battlefields.
On century later, has nature completely reclaimed the land?
Denis Darzacq, Comme un seul homme
Through April 30, 2017
Palais Fesch, Musée des beaux-Arts d’Ajaccio
50-52 Rue Cardinal Fesch
20000 Ajaccio
France
