Raymonde Carasco
1933-2009
On discovering the work of Raymonde Carasco -- an exemplary poetic enterprise in contemporary cinema -- suddenly it seems that film is at last accomplishing the ideals of German Romanticism. 'If you wish to enter into the depths of the physical', wrote Schlegel, 'you must first be initiated into the mysteries of poetry'. How can cinema reach the poetic truth of phenomena, how should the sensual description of appearances and particularities be converted into such a 'magnetic song'? We must thus go back to the very origin of Carasco's quest. She did not set out for Mexico in the late 1970s in order to rape and pillage the imaginary of the Tarahumaras, but rather to follow the traces of Antonin Artaud, to empirically verify the encounter between a sacred text of modernity and its reality. With the result that her research does not comprise a classical type of investigation (to hide, discover, expose), but an alliance of the senses: to enjoy the privilege of being there, to accept that that she will never see everything, to acquiesce in the gradual revelation of only a few traces, to grasp some movements, some signs that testify to the beauty of friendship, before pretending to und…
Films