Dura Lex

In this shattering, terrible film, where the irreversible welds together the tragic sense of time, I was immediately seized by what I would call “the music of the eye”, that is, Koulechov’s genius for creating language through the eye, through an extraordinary system which, with sound absent, would make everything that makes the eye attentive, dreamy and sensitive speak in an ante-sound language. Koulechov invented a veritable music at the heart of the mute eye, with its own movement, its own description of temporal forms in scrolls, throws, ruptures, flows and tensions.

Two axes then guided the writing of the instrumental score, here for septet: the first axis was the subtle, the nothing – the beautiful fine energies of physics and neurobiology, then the infinite lace of chamber music writing, set by the silence of the silent image, as if musical sound were absorbed in the movement of the image. Silence as matter, then, as the limit where the ear touches the silent eye when it speaks.

The second axis was based on the following principle: the film can be divided into 14 episodes, in the course of which the metaphysics of human feeling crosses an unheard-of spectrum of differences, depths, chasms or bursts of light, and this through an architecture of time in the form of an asymptotic line, a point that spins towards an impossible limit, an infinite perspective, and where the end of the film touches on a space outside time…