Les Immobiles - Marie Voignier

Artist and filmmaker Marie Voignier uses documentary material as a terrain for visual and methodological experiments.  Her film Les immobiles (2013) portrays an era noted for the obscene violence of organised safaris on the African continent, at a time when it was in the process of shaking off the yoke of colonialism. The film homes in on the decadent cultural practices of that period which has not entirely disappeared. Sitting in front of a fixed lens camera, a retired hunting guide slowly turns the pages of his memoirs. The morbid images of a decadent leisure activity rise out of them in the form of still photographs of white hunters showing off their trophies. Marie Voignier's only artifice is a deliberate decision to film the hands of this paradoxical storyteller from a bygone era in close-up, as he takes us through his macabre photo album. She records his nostalgic recollections without comment or interruption.