Jean-Marie Gleize's 'Film à venir' Blends Text and Photography

Jean-Marie Gleize's latest book 'Film à venir', published by Éditions du Seuil, presents textual propositions that converse with photographs in a strictly choreographed prose. The layout of the filmic horizon is visually and rhythmically audacious: blocks and cubes of prose, fragments of quotations, underlined or capitalized statements, short dialogue passages, parentheses, italic irruptions, bold text, inserted photos, black monochrome, political or advertising flyers, a topographic map reproduction, and dark page backgrounds where letters appear like apparitions. This formal research invents minimal propositions that sometimes align with the breath of narrative prose. The tale, an abridged 'animal story', deploys shadowed yet embodied characters and frames a disenchanted parenthesis referencing writers Alix Cléo Roubaud and Michel Crozatier. The journey in this quest is plural: temporal (a capital scene in a past the present cannot surpass), spatial, and linguistic (French, English, Italian). This voyage converts into 'voyagement', a neologism defining the poetic art as a wish for a language closest to an unnameable intimacy: 'I recopy this way of dying. It is a voyagement (from one to the other). Around us there is water. […] A voyagement, an exactly surpassional writing.' Without lying or lying to language, the book addresses the precious question 'Where is my father, in this world?' as a repeated trial.