THE MAN FROM ARAN

Off the coast of Ireland, on an arid island beaten by the winds, the story of a family of fishermen through their daily activities. The father, in order to grow a meager crop, makes earth with his own hands by breaking huge blocks of stone, the mother paces the beaches to collect seaweed at the risk of being swept away by the waves, while the son fishes from the top of a huge cliff. The latter sees a whale shark. Soon it is the excitement and the men of the village leave for the sea to hunt the animal. The film is not a testimony of the life of its inhabitants at the time of the shooting but a search for the essence of this life and this island. Even today, the film has lost none of its strength and beauty. As with Nanouk, Flaherty has succeeded in bringing these people through the decades and making them as alive for us as they were for his contemporaries.
Olivier Bitoun
David Chiesa has been developing a special relationship with images for many years. He works in particular with members of MTK, an experimental film laboratory based in Grenoble.
Instrumentarium : double bass, piano frame, electric bass
Loic Lachaize : spatialization, real time sound processing.
L'homme d'Aran , quadraphonic installation.
When David invited me to think about a spatialized diffusion of this concert film, I did not immediately understand his proposal.
It has been several years since he played this show as a soloist and he already carries high the images of the film of Robert J. Flaherty.
It seems obvious to me now that we have worked together, that the violence, the radicality of the life of these men on this island, at the beginning of the 20th century, calls for the out of frame, the immersion that a quadraphonic installation can make us feel. The immensity of the storms, the depth of the ocean under these tiny boats, the height of the cliffs, everything in this film incites me to stretch, to alternate David's improvised score in order to try to give an account of the excess that we are talking about