Aliénor de Mézamat

Well! Dance, now...

Les dessins

The iconic book ”Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century” by Patrik Ouředník, first published in 2001, thanks to the imagination of the French filmmaker has transformed into an apocalyptic chronicle of the last century. A straightforward testimony of scientific rationality, which led the society to a spiritual crisis and resulted in six genocides, is accompanied with melancholic Mahlerian echoes of La Belle Époque when the world was just getting ready for the century that negated all humanity. The film raises the question whether Europe in post-history and post-humanity, sweetly anaesthetized to collective unconsciousness, will pretend as if nothing had happened.

Set in Belle Époque France, the story follows nineteen-year-old "hysteria" patient Augustine, the star of Professor Charcot's experiments in hypnosis, as she transitions from object of study to object of desire.

Despite the fact that there have been many changes over time in the way anorexia is viewed on a societal, cultural and medical level, the condition remains an enigma. For centuries, descriptions and interpretations of the condition - some conflicting, some complementary - have followed on from one another. This illness of mind and body resists any exclusively biological or exclusively psychoanalytical approach. The body, which becomes a battleground, bears the brunt of this relationship and dependency disorder.

111, Fantaisie