2024-01-08 18:27:27
The sea, always starting again, says the poet. How could this incessant, unpredictable movement, its waves and its tides, its perpetual instability, its calm as well as its storms, not have inspired cinema, the art of the moving image? The Lumière brothers send the first operators to the seas around the world. The marriage of cinema with the world of silence, so poorly named as it is so sonorous and noisy, populated by strange beings, fascinating as well as disturbing, has only just begun. This moving universe, three-quarters of the planet, calls for dialogue with images.
World of sublime beauty and extreme anguish which swallows reckless sailors, lined with shipwrecked people swallowed up forever in the terror of these abysses. The furies of the oceans, their savagery, their devastating effects imprint minds and films. These maddening metamorphoses that no one knows how to control could not escape the imagination of cinema.
Cinema took over from the arts that had preceded it, haunted by the subject. The magic lanterns of the 17th century, the panoramas of the following century are filled with magical or terrifying horizons, sea monsters and bold three-masted ships. Painters and novelists try to approach this elusive unknown in its changing moods.
A vast exhibition on “the filmed ocean”, with its ambitious scenography, unfolds in the majestic setting of the Maritime Museum, reinvented, dusted off, unrecognizable, embellished after years of work. Each room is punctuated by an immutable rhythm: theme, posters and film extracts, cameras designed for the aquatic world, costumes, objects. We see the technological mutations to explore the darkness of the oceans, to embrace their wide oscillations and their sudden outbursts, to follow the seafaring people, as Commander Cousteau and Jacques Perrin did.
Stroll through a century of technological innovations, blockbuster films, Twenty thousand leagues under sea (alas reduced to two posters) at Titanic, which attracted crowds from all over the world. Films of pirates, naval battles, wanderings and underwater terrors, parodic works and documentaries bear witness to this unalterable interest of humanity, its need to understand the vast universe which envelops it and nourishes it, rocks it. and threatens him, and to fix the memory of it. These ambivalent images become embedded in the collective memory. For the best, a taste of paradise, and the worst, to be nothing in the face of the raging elements.
“Objective to the sea: the ocean filmed”, at the Musée de la Marine, Paris. Until May 5. musee-marine.fr
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