MEDITERAN / Méditerranée

France
1963. / 44’ / 35mm

Directed by :
Jean-Daniel Pollet

Written by:
Philippe Sollers

Distribution:
P.O.M. FILMS
Paris-Ouagadougou-Montréal films
7 rue de la Convention
93100 – MONTREUIL
TEL. : 01.49.88.18.42
FAX : 01.49.88.70.73

An undisputed masterpiece, by many an “unidentified film object” of world cinema is the most important work of the French new wave filmmaker Jean-Daniel Pollet, who was in 1962 included among 162 new authors compared to Jean Vigo, by the editors of Cahiers du cinema.

His radically original style, meditative, poetic assemblage is a representative of modernist film-essays whose images are connected by lyrical thoughts of Philippe Sollers (novelist and founder of Tel Quel magazine) about the myth of the Mediterranean and the music of Antoine Duhamel. This eminently montage-road-movie is a rhythmical collage in an obsessive search for the Ancient civilization as unattainable destination. Footage assembled by Pollet and Volker Schlöndorf during a four month long journey in 1962-63, covers 35000 km of the Mediterranean and encourages “geometrical and metaphysical thoughts, that which moves from right to left, in the depth, turns to rubble, comes to the hospital bed: metaphysics of the things that sounds like silence”. Godard described the images of the film for Cahiers magazine as “round and smooth frames, left on the screen like pebbles on the beach”. Pollet’s frames left traces in the search for history, civilization, ideology of the Mediterranean in Godard’s Contempt.

Jean-Daniel Pollet, born in 1936 in Paris, studied political science. Impressed audiences with his very first film Pourvu qu’on ait l’ivresse (1957.) about loneliness, in which he introduced Claude Melki, who will become his actor-fetish. In his poetic essay and fiction films collaborated with poet Francis Ponega and writer Jeanom Thibaudeau.
Films: Gala 1961, Rue Saint-Denis 1964, part of an omnibus Paris vu par, L’Amour c’est gai, l’amour c’est triste 1969, L’Acrobate 1975.