VERDICT: Alice Brygo’s arresting film is an experiential recreation of the crowds massing around the burning Notre-Dame in 2019 and myriad responses to the catastrophic events.
“Some fires can’t be put out,” says one of the voices that Alice Brygo’s camera ominously glides past in her strange and evocative short documentary Ardent Other. The film is created from images captured by the filmmaker in April 2019, as hordes of onlookers stared in awe and horror as flames engulfed the 850-year-old Notre-dame du Paris. Brygo has repurposed this footage into both a surreal slow-motion observation of her own, and then a floating tour around and through the enrapt crowd, accompanied by a textured soundscape that seems to eavesdrop on snatches of conversations, or perhaps even delves into personal thoughts, as people wonder about the fire and contemplate its impact.
The film reverses the angle of perspective, taking in not the blaze itself but the expressions of those watching it. It feels somewhat natural to connect the film to Abbas Kiarostami’s Shirin – which depicted an audience watching an unseen theatrical performance – though of course, these people are not looking at an artwork, though they may be just as enthralled. The opening few minutes present slowed down footage of the crowds, as mouths gape and eyes widen in dismay. Gradually, the echoing sound design coalesces into the concerned murmurs, and then mortified gasps, of the crowd. What Ardent Other then becomes is a virtual recreation of the scene which uses photogrammetry and visual effects to construct an eerie digital landscape, littered with onlookers bathed in the light of hidden flames.
Now Brygo’s camera moves around individuals, circling them and drifting between them while the audio becomes a collage of sentences and turns of phrase. Through these voices, the film explores a whole host of different reactions to what people are seeing – all the way from lamenting the destruction of hundreds of years of history, to those who intimate some sort of reckoning being delivered upon the church for prior misdeeds. Perhaps the most startling moment is when someone hopes that nobody was inside when the fire began, and it dawns on us that this might be the first mention of concern for people rather than the heritage that the fire might have consumed. All these refracting thoughts combine to form a complex tapestry that both interprets and revels in the mystery of the massed crowd staring unblinkingly at a fiery disaster.
Director, cinematography, editing: Alice Brygo
Screenplay: Alice Brygo, Paulo Gatabase
Producer: Luc-Jérôme Bailleul
Music: Fatma Pneumonia, Paul Lajus
Sound design: Paul Lajus
3D Artist: Nathan Ghali
Production companies: Le Fresnoy (France)
Venue: Visions du Réel (International Medium Length & Short Film Competition)
In French
16 minutes
