Synopsis
The film Disneyland, my old native land contains : the history of Hamelin, the flute player, 24 children in strollers, a theory about roller coasters, a concentrate of personal feelings, a few of Dingo’s union demands, a rehabilitation of blindness, a way to cure tonsil cancer, the tender description of a few surprising characters, a suicide in Mississippi, the death of Mickey, some swans, several ducks, an identikit portrait of the author and a small map of childhood.

Holyland Experience is Pierre Moignard’s most recent film(2012). The film, titled after the Orlando amusement park, The Holy land Experience, whose historical theme is the life of Jesus, conjugates in a savant and carnivalesque manner the phenomenology of the park’s décor and the narrative trajectory of Carl Dreyer’s film : Ordet (The Word that is pronounced through the figure of Christ incarnated by the « mad » son Johannes, released as ‘The Word’ in English).

Texte
Disneyland, my old native land (Arnaud des Pallières) and Holyland Experience (Pierre Moignard) submerge us in the ambience a thematic amusement park and interpret its signs, the meaning of which go beyond the idea of diversion and must be understood in terms of the movement of history. What does Disneyland tell us if we participate in the game it invites us to play ? Who are we observing in this staging of the sacred, which seems crazy and immoderate to our European eyes ? By what should we be possessed in order to abandon ourselves to attractions that suppress, a priori, the very idea of well being ?

It is the plasticity of the images that allows us to discover the nature of these sites. We are plunged into them in a frontal manner, as if it were necessary to clothe our regard in an initial innocence in order to understand what is really happening and wounding our sensitivity, in this trial of an amusement park that, for Arnaud des Pallières,resembles a concentration camp.

Pierre Moignard augments the experience of visual immersion by submerging us in a language that is foreign to us in many ways, borrowing from Dreyer’s masterpiece. The word of the son in Ordet accompanies the itinerary of the film by adding a supplementary strangeness and acts on our attention in an apparent paradox, forcing it to interpret as mystery the visual and audio network that unfolds onscreen.
Rodolphe Olcèse

Biographies

Born in Paris on December 1, 1961, Arnaud des Pallières studied literature before moving towards the theater. In collaboration with Jean-Pierre Rehm, he created his own grouup, the Théâtre en demeure. He continued his career in cinema and television. His work has won awards in international festivals. Recently his film ‘Michael Kohlhaas’ was presented at Cannes.

Pierre Moignard, born in 1961 in Tébessa in Algeria, lives and works in Paris. At the beginning of his career, Pierre Moignard was influenced by Seurat and the  first exhibition that deeply impressed him was Manet’s at the Grand Palais in 1982. In 1987 he participated with two other artists in an exhibition at the Musée National d’Art Moderne that remains in the annals of the art world as the last artistic scandal in Paris. He presented a large number of paintings pretexting the Bible as iconographic inspiration. Painted rapidly using a system of brightly colored crosshatches, these paintings were intended as a juvenile and iconoclasstic response in reaction to the dominant practices of the art of the time. In 1990, he moved to Paris, where he begins work on two series. The first, (self-portraits), are small paintings, all of the same size, paradoxically imagined in accordance with a desire to exceed the formalist posture. The second series, ‘compossibles’, are paintings that the press identified with the work of Francis Bacon. In 1994 the Pompidou Center presented (self-portraits)and the following year Pierre Moignard obtained his first one-man show in a Parisian gallery with ‘Compossibles.’
Pierre Moignard is familar with Venice Beach in Los Angeles. He walked it relentlessly, from 2006 to 2006, to capture filmic material for his first film, Who choseth me, Notes for the Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare’s play is refreshed and refilmed in today’s America, somewhere between Venice Beach and the Venetian casino in Las Vegas, where the décors manage to create a new form of reality.

Informations

Address
1, allée du Progrès
93120 La Courneuve
01 49 92 61 95

Access
Métro ligne 7 (station La Courneuve – 8 mai 1945)
Tramway (station Hôtel de ville La Courneuve, face au cinéma)
RER B (station La Courneuve – Aubervilliers)

http://www.ville-la-courneuve.fr/LC_idocs/ville_reussite_culture/cinema_etoile.php

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