La comédie du réel
Conferences directed by Jérôme Mauche.
Filmmaker Alain Guiraudie and novelist Fred Léal are the guests of this new session of Poetry Platform.
Titled « The Comedy of the Real, » the event will serve as a reminder of the extent to which reality may also be an outstanding and delightful playground, and for some artists one favorable to countless constructions and unexpected developments. In this respect, Alain Guiraudie’s films and Fred Léal’s novels, pregnant with realism and phantasmagoria, share the twin imperatives of lucidity and joyfulness.
Their works are inscribed in the same « locale, » southwestern France. They are marked by the concern for a « genuine » form in image and language, and involve frenzied narrations working through social and sexual stereotypes. These two authors are simply essential at the moment.
BIOGRAPHIES
Alain Guiraudie, who also writes his scripts, creates funny, picaresque worlds, political in their own way, anchored in social and local realities. He shoots his films mostly in Aveyron, where he lives and works.
He has made seven short or feature films since Les héros sont immortels in 1990, including Tout droit jusqu’au matin (1994), Du soleil pour les gueux (2001), and Ce vieux rêve qui bouge (2001), which was awarded the Jean Vigo prize. His three other films, Pas de repos pour les braves (2003), Voici venu le temps (2005), and Le Roi de l’évasion (2009), selected in many festivals, have met with increasing public and critical success.
Fred Léal is a physician in Bordeaux and the author of an exhilarating and sophisticated work in which forms borrowed from popular culture also drive narration.
He has authored both novels and short stories: Selva, (2002), Bleu note (2003), Let’s let’s go (2005), Un trou sous la brèche, (2006), La porte ‘verte (2008), and délaissé (2010) with P.O.L.; Mismatch (2002), Le peigne-noir (2004), In terroir gâteau, (2005), and Le peigne-rose, with Éditions de l’Attente; and a diary, Comme le loup blanc, published on the occasion of Biennale d’Anglet (Le bleu du ciel, 2011).
