Title: Eight years later
Voice-over: My first French teacher was my grandfather, a survivor of the first world war. Like every soldier, he learned the two kinds of memory, the souvenir and the mémoire. The souvenir is a plot summary, the way you tell a friend what just happened. A story.
The mémoire is a pre-story, a fragment, a rough cut. We can see in the special behaviour of people who can’t live inside accepted explanations, that their actions are driven by memory. We watch their queer bodies remembering. Sometimes this memory is violence, because memory is a wild piece of the body inside us. It can produce impossible dreams and impossible lives.
The mémoire can arrive in daily life, for instance, when we fall in love. In love we open ourselves to our fears. To fall in love is something very brutal, it can’t be explained because it’s related to this deep field of mémoire.