Le cinéma de Bruno Dumont en fragments alphabétiques
under the direction of Benjamin Thomas

From La vie de Jesus in 1997 to the most recent Jeanne, Bruno Dumont’s cinema is placed as close as possible to gestures, bodies, places … His works, in sometimes very different registers and genres, welcome accidents, incidents, disdain the dramatic construction expected to observe the coexistence of opposites, in the world as in human beings. Dumont’s films, far from simply capturing aspects of a raw world, take the visible as its reverse seriously. The composition and the editing are as decisive there as the desire to make sensitive the dense part of the invisible in which the images are laminated.

One of the ways of approaching a cinema of such aesthetic and thematic richness would perhaps be precisely to maintain a plurality of points of view, a coexistence of readings about it.

In any case, this is the route taken here : a collective reflection, in the form of sixty-seven alphabetical fragments – from “Acteurs” to “Zombies et cannibales”, passing by “Bach”, “Bailleul”, “Écriture”, “Grotesque”, “Mystique”, “P’tit Quinquin”, “Politique” ou “Bruegel” –, signed by twenty-eight authors, devoted to feature films and series as well as to heady questions and reasons, as as many possible inputs for thinking about Bruno Dumont’s cinema.

Texts by :
Maryline Alligier (“Écriture”, “Jeanne”), Vincent Amiel (“Bresson”, “Ma Loute”, “Twentynine Palms”), Frédéric Cavé (“Interstices”, “Sibérie”), Christophe F.D. Coste (“Onomastique”), Christophe Damour (“Acteurs”, “Naturalisme”), Simon Daniellou (“Raccord”), Sébastien David (“P’tit Quinquin”, “Onomastique”), Jean-Michel Durafour (“Bach”, “Caplet”, “Christophe”, “Igorrr”, “Lekeu”, “Royer”), Azélie Fayolle (“Burlesque”, “Intrigue”, “Renan”), Rémi Fontanel (“Camille Claudel 1915″, “Chutes”, “Regard”), Hélène Frazik (“Carnaval”, “Grotesque”), Daphnée Guerdin (“Femmes”, “Maternité”, “Virilité”), Fiona Hosti (“Alchimie”, “Oiseaux”), Raphaël Jaudon (“Avances”, “Classes”, “Larmes”, “Politique”), Célia Kadouche (“Idiotie”, “Langage”, “Transcendance”), Stefan Kristensen (“Flandres”), Claudine Le Pallec Marand (“Sexualité”), Louise Lienhard (“Violence”, “Zombies et cannibales”), Ma Xinxin (“Images pensives”), Clément Montcharmont (“Enfance”, “Jeannette, l’enfance de Jeanne d’Arc”), Sophie Pierre (“Espace”), Aurel Rotival (“Sacré”), Maxime Scheinfeigel (“Animus et Anima”), Raphaël Szöllösy (“Alchimie”, “Coincoin et les Z’inhumains”), Benjamin Thomas (“Bailleul”, “Bruegel”, “De Winter”, “Epstein”, “Les Flandres”, “Giotto”, “Hors Satan”, “L’humanité”, “Lille”, “Littéraire”, “Paysages”, “Réel, réalités”, “Reprendre”, “Van der Weyden”), Thomas Vallois (“La Vie de Jésus”), Hélène Valmary (“Dernier plan”), Luc Vancheri (“Hadjewich”, “Mystique”).