SCÈNES DE CHASSE AU SANGLIER

"The initial impulse stems from this: to question the notion of the ‘real’, precise yet at the same time vague. What does this word mean? What connotations does it hold?  The second impulse is to build around this, say, complex notion an ‘accessible’, comprehensible, humorous film, by using elements which derive from the intimate, and from sociology, from philosophy, psychoanalysis… from hunting. As with my other projects there is some ‘mise en situation, artifice and ‘rough’… a voice off. As for the intimate… the deaths of those close to me; my father’s recent death. I’ve had this strange desire – which I still can’t explain – to want to film his dead body. Yes, the desire to film this reality. I will also ask a psychoanalyst, my former philosophy professor, to participate. How to get something from an experience we would share? We will go hunting together and we will see. Yes, to go hunting, to track something which is not easy to seize, to take, to look at, to study… a wild animal… a wild boar. Then, I say to myself… the best way to study that which flees, that which escapes… would it not be to kill it and then ‘to rebuild’ it, to resuscitate it… to have just one image of it… just one object… thanks to taxidermy… to stuff ‘reality’, i.e. the animal, to finally be able to get close to it? And why all that? I wonder whether at bottom… at the bottom of our manner of looking at and of conceiving the real… today… if there isn’t a similar ritual of killing… without which there would be no means to apprehend, to observe the world. Our concept of the real, isn’t it – today – as poor, inanimate, reduced… as a stuffed wild boar?" (Claudio Pazienza, November 2006)