Associação Cultural Videobrasil

The poet, guardian of the infinity faces of the living*

The theme forced me to get up at dawn. It is not that I detest doing it, in contrary, I like to get up early in the morning, but it made me walk back all my way. When I was young, I have been a theater student in the Bordeaux School and declaimed poems in the radio every week, usually in direct transmission to experienced public. Some years later I abandoned the theater to work with film, and then to take to video and TV. There it is: everything is very simple. However, I had never abandoned poetry. To me, it lasted the deep body, mysterious and transcendental of our human wrapper, the real metaphor and the metamorphic "cry" of reality. I love the poetry of the soul, the one that drives naturally and infallibly through the trip of the brain-brain to the heart-brain and to the body-brain.

"Magician of insecurity, the poet has no pleasures but the adopted ones. Always unfinished ashes"(1). The alchemy of the video and poetry could be a Great Work of the time of electronics, digital and virtual. In the current world, more concerned with the communication of the machines and between them - an endless communication - can one talk about poetry? But where is the poetry? In the cries of a young poet seventeen years old, up today, the most perturbing, the most disquieting, and the most authentic of all our poets: Arthur Rimbaud. In D'une Saison en Enfer, Jean-Christophe Averty exalts the clamor of a teenager, placing furtively the pictures or painting, the desperate accents of the mental patients of a hospice.

There is more poetry in "reading" than in "listening." It is in the fragment, in the rest, in the rags of the memory of the wonderful film of Patrick de Geetere and Cathy Wagner: En pire. In the strange emptiness of the poem of Borges, "Ausencia", by Christian Barani. In the love codes, however uncertain and fragile, of L'amour Transcodé of Patrick Prado. There is more poetry in "writing" than in "listening". It is in the fiction, in the documentation, in the poets' representation of the work of Jean-Paul Fargier. It is in Gallota 's body interpreting the man that spoke twenty-five languages, the poet Armand Robin. Curved over the beauty, Robin translated and served the greatest of all: Pouchkin, Ady, Fröding, Imroulquais, Tou-Fou, Essenin, Maiakovsky, Palamas, and in this way he paid homages to men from all over the world.

There is more poetry in "seeing" than in "listening. "It is in the contemplation of Scénografhie Wan Paysage of Dominique Belloir, in the distress and suffering in D'après le Naufrage of Alian Escalle, in the look and in the observation in four de Beau Temps of Valerie De Meerleer. In L'amour du Regard of Hervé Nisic, which the invisibility in the full page drives us to our own power, and helps us to cross, with no danger nor anguish, the wall of death. Our own death.

There is more poetry in 'feeling than in "touching." Cathy Vogan, in Methuselah, says to us - from the tree cavity to the deep of the soul - that what the wonderful philosophic story of Paulo Coelho, O Alquimista, reveals to us: Each of us has our own legend and must live it.

The poetry frequently gets people away. Read it? Sometimes. Listen to it? Not often. See it? Yes, but with the condition of not seeing it, maybe.

Nevertheless, it is there, subtle, tenacious, inextirpable, unshakable, immortal. It transpires in every place, in the interior and exterior of the skin. Capillary, it branches off in our pulse system. It remains firm, superb, rigorous, indomitable. It is on the streets, in the houses, in the eyes, in the time, in the space, in the elements, in the body, on the nature, in the words, in the sounds, in the rhythms, in the movements. It is jubilant with Michel Jaffrenon, fresh, joyful and energy in Vidéoperette. Pure, spontaneous, ingenuous in the hands of the electronic Michaël Gauminits. Grave, tern and deep interpreting through images the magnificent verses of Omar Kbayyâm, or even breath-taken in the soul-stirring letter of the embroideres 's husband in Courrier des Telespectateurs.

There is always poetry to those that know bow to see it, to listen to it, to feel it, to recognize it and to accept it. It is present in each of us and it does not help to talk or write about it as it is not a concept, it is a state. A state that we frequently ignore or refute. A tie that "The poet, guardian of the infinite faces of the living, or the alchemist of images, webs between us and him, for preserving the unilateral stability with the gathering of peace. "One may, finally, live without philosophy, without music, without happiness and without love. But not that well. "(2)

Yes, not that well, not without this light wind that sometimes caresses us or this fire that burn us, without this look that makes me to see you and you to smile to me.

* e (1) René Char "Fureeur et mystère." Poésie/Gallimard, 1967
(2) Vladimir Jankélévitch.

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL. "10th Videobrasil International Electronic Art Festival": 20th to 25th November 1994, São Paulo, Brazil, 1994.