Gérard Courant b. 1951
Living is a Solution (1980)
Once again, Courant uses his own love for cinema as a source of inspiration; in this case, the trigger is Hotel du Nord (1938), directed by Marcel Carné and starred by Arletty. Vivre est une solution is a tribute to this actress, portrayed as if she was a new heroine that carries on every rite of passage in the two previous episodes of the Le Jardin des Abymes tetralogy. Yet now she is absent, and evoked as a ghost. Immersing himself in Paris after travelling through the Pyrenees in the previous segment, Courant approaches the sensitivity of the Nouvelle Vague to shoot his love letter for the French capital, including a cinephile evocation. It is not a coincidence that the movie he chose as an inspiration belongs to the French poetic realism, a period that took place before the war. In the same way as French poetic realism did, Courant seems to reconfigure over and over again the unforeseeable crossroads where lyric experimentation and documentary filmmaking meet.