After Menstruation Frequent Urination

lovers or Melies, Griffith, Proust, David Lynch and psychoanalysis, do not miss My Winnipeg, a cinematic experience "unique" due to our beloved Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin, a rare artist:

"He has made only 10 feature films in 23 years .
-distribution of his films is at best elliptical and weak: thus we find his works in chronological disorder, when some are not totally obscured.
-Few exhibitors dare to project his films because of abject ignorance or timidity which is not least, depriving the public of a passionate rendezvous with the originality and poetry that invigorate the 7th art better than any of Lynch's films combined.
"He is one of those rare filmmakers I've become an ardent admirer. I count among my trio of Canadian filmmakers fetish along with Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg.

opportunities to enjoy a stunning sensory experience is so rare that it would miss the obscene films by Guy Maddin. I have not seen much, only three feature films ( Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary, Brand upon the Brain, My Winnipeg ), because the media seldom speak to him, because that his films are poorly distributed in France and because it also takes time to build a culture cinephile worthy of the name. I missed The saddest music in the world , but I will have the opportunity to catch up in time.

My Winnipeg was conducted in 2007 and appears projected onto some of our screens, so that Guy Maddin has finally in France in a late consideration: indeed, at Beaubourg, we are offered the chance to see a retrospective of his work. Lucky them, these Parisians!

Already, My Winnipeg proves to me the most successful work of its author, at least the most consistent. Contrary to his habits, he is not a fiction of this time developed from his memories, but a documentary in the true sense of the word. Caution, do not expect to find work stern of a filmmaker who, having documented on a city and have classified information on his topic, you expose an objective, geographical, social and political.
Documentaries are back on the front of the stage, and so much the better: they question our world and denounce the evils. But Guy Maddin is in a totally and irremediably different. Far from aiming for an impossible objectivity, it takes the subjective nature of his vision and plunges deep inside himself to examine the love-hate relationship that binds him to his hometown of Winnipeg as the most populous city Canada (Manitoba).

Initially, the project is initiated by a command of Canadian television. Making a documentary about Winnipeg enchants little, he who dedicates a healthy abjection to the dictatorship of Realism that invades our screens until the new digital technology of special effects that, far from place to dream, aim instead for rendering more realistic (see the disaster movies of Mr. Independence day and 2012).
If a pedigree to mention the film by Guy Maddin, it is first on the side of the surreal that we must go find: My Winnipeg is a deeply moving ode to his hometown in which the filmmaker has lived for nearly fifty years and the influence which he must free himself as the womb. From the title, the incongruous presence of the determiner possessive "my" clearly raises the stakes of the documentary project. Guy Maddin is not going to make a sightseeing tour of his hometown under the guise of a presentation of the capital of Manitoba, Winnipeg is actually hollow portrait of its author. His pictures and his commentary namesake revive, not the city, but his experience of his city through the prism of his memory elitist and distorting.
Thus the film is punctuated by the leitmotif of the train trip that brings the narrator to his hometown return that you can imagine as the ultimate. The train is an allegory of the labyrinth of memories. The man looked at the window of his compartment keeps watch Winnipeg marching in a hypnotic ballet of snowy images, transfixed by the regular passage of flakes as the stripes of an old film strip of the silent era, and sinking in the middle of the night while the voiceover narration that recites the filmmaker gives way to metaphors and other associations of free ideas that identify verbatim Winnipeg castrating a matrix, a metaphor made possible by the design formed the basis of two rivers in the city. The commentary Maddin explores his psyche and offers an image of Winnipeg subjectified completely, and therefore all the more authentic.

Madness film is to describe this ghostly city its size, the memories and memory deformans, a city of superlatives, the somnambulist city par excellence. I thought then that the nightmare vision Lars von Trier proposed the imaginary city of Element of Crime . Maddin von Trier as the first time, is a filmmaker who incantatory practice the virtues subliminal cinema, what makes it possible to work on the sound is absolutely amazing. The sounds flowing in abundance in My Winnipeg. Allies Voice Guy Maddin and tired to use original music, they plunge us into the texture of which memories are made, between fantasy and magic, poetry and humor.

The editing of the film gives rise to a demonstration of virtuosity Guy Maddin that mixes the city's own memories (from his photo albums or carried by the magic of cinema), archive footage covering the events or facts various founders of Winnipeg and gaps of dizzying invention from which springs the irrational (dreams, fantasies) in an explosion of fantasy.

(more ...)

Feemale Nipple Piercing

Walk among the ruins

Since my meeting with painters William Turner and Caspar Friedrich, with pre-romantic poetry of Coleridge and Wordsworth, the French school of poetry Lamartine and Nerval, I am inhabited by inner landscapes of great beauty. Reporting to the unspeakable, as they call me on my second ticket I clumsily tried to get them to the surface of my consciousness. Naturally, I had touched these precious spaces, havens of the soul as the English Gothic literature, through the sublime prose of Ann Radcliffe, was able to portray the genius that characterizes it.

It is difficult to conceive that these landscapes can exist, that our feet may trample them. Yet that is what happened to me several times during my wanderings in the village of Oppede-le-old.



This charming village is among the finest in the Vaucluse with those of Gordes and Roussillon Menerbes. All villages of the Luberon worth seeing if only for the art sensitivity with which it has managed to integrate into the landscape to the point they seem to have sprung from the earth. Gordes is for the harmony of the arrangement of these houses that irresistibly evokes the charm of the village of Santon. Roussillon prints the retina to the ocher of his land that gives color to the houses it hosts.

Oppede-le-Vieux exudes a mood far more profound than that of its neighbors in Provence. It is indeed a Provencal village given its geographical location, a few kilometers from Cavaillon, at the entrance to the Luberon range. It is reached by the Departmental 176. It is a medieval village perched on a rocky outcrop and set in lush greenery of the forest consists of small Luberon. Facing him, on the other side lies the alluvial plain of Coulon.

Oppede-Le-Vieux perched on its rocky

The ascent is the key to travel for visiting Oppède

Oppède is divided in two since the beginning of the twentieth century, when the villagers came down from his rocky to build at his feet Oppède les Poulivets. Thus, life has gradually left the village original, old buildings are depopulating over the decades until it fell into disrepair.

Oppède consists of four strategic points in the high part: its fortifications which there are only few remains of the chapel of the White Penitents uphill to the Notre Dame Dolidon dating from the sixteenth century and its feudal castle perched on a rocky outcrop overlooking the Petit Luberon forest.

The ruined castle overlooking the village

Oppède Walking in is like sliding down the nuggets of a poem whose verses shoot out with every stride. It's like listening to a whispered lament on medieval instruments. It back in time and join an era before electricity. On reaching the village after crossing a terraced garden, one sees first the Collegiate and the castle ruins that rival of seduction and mystery by playing roofs and trees that reveal them to better hide and reveal to better conceal them.

ruins glimpsed as a promise of wonders to come.

(photo: Fred and Bea)

The entrance to the village is through the alley that opens onto the main square .
(photo: Bea)

few more steps and now opens up the lane on a beautiful sun kissed the bottom of which stands a tower whose arch demonstrates that it should be once a door of an enclosure which has since disappeared. Le Petit Cafe, which spreads its laziness in a corner of the square, in the shade of a tree generous deployment, is somehow a significant part, the soul of the village where some poets Sunday or disappointed urban hell come to enjoy a breakfast of yesteryear.

The place with the Little Cafe at the corner where Charlotte Rampling is drinking his coffee every morning in the film by François Ozon: Swimming Pool

view opposite to the previous image: the door-bell instead

Here is abolished any noise. It would not bother with the spirit of the master of those places full of history: the silence ... enveloping the stone houses of the old village, interferes in their joints and accepts its subliminal melody on a different tone: that of light projecting its shadow on the facades ageless one breath discrete raises a dream of quivering foliage .

Longevity of the stone, the plant permanently, tomb men

(photo: Fred)

There is almost nothing left of Oppède, only a few houses restored by wealthy patrons , nostalgia for a thriving aristocracy ruled by the cult of beauty. When you walk along the facades of these homes for battered green veins visible, one can only feel caught in the verses of Lamartine and Nerval who breathed in these countries ghostly feelings of impermanence and loneliness, punishment of beings heightened sensitivity.

"My heart, weary of everything, even hope, will go over
vows annoy the fate
Lend me only, valley of my childhood,
An asylum for a day wait for death.

Here the narrow path of the dark valley: From
flank of these hills hung with thick woods,
Who, bending their shadow on my brow intermixed,
Me cover whole of silence and peace. (...)


Your days as dark and short days of autumn,
decline as shadow on the slope of hillsides;
Friendship betrays you, pity abandons you
And only you go down the path of tombs.

But nature is there to invite you and love you;
Dive into her bosom she opens your always
When everything changes for you, nature is the same,
And the same sun rises on your life. "

Alphonse de Lamartine, The valley , poetic meditations

Entering Oppède once crossed the arch of the tower
(photo: Fred and Bea)

Gerard de Nerval find he Sylvie on coarse pavement to climb the hill to the castle in ruins?
(photo: Fred and Bea)

Sometimes I just feel this strange and penetrating than the agony behind these walls beats the dream of a past life that I lived in for one of those medieval houses. Why was I born to junk the oil era and much regretted by the feudal class, among the purple and ermine of the song Trouvères the Court of Eleanor of Aquitaine?

(photo: Fred)

Sometimes along a wall, I see an area away from view, hoisted on my feet between the bars of a grille, elegant stained glass windows of their secret taunt me silence.

When light infuses a semblance of life window blind

(photo: Bea)

Do not expect to find mostly a bunch of artisans in Oppede, as found in any village which lives only in the trade, tourist trap in search of authenticity. The only artist who has elected a permanent home remains Mother Nature applies, with all the tools that inflicts the time, distilling the crumbling walls among the plants that lie at the mercy of their goodwill arabesques. By the way what had once been a door, I became a well of light and shadow in which the ruined walls were used as background to a growing rebellion. The death and life in harmony with a rare happiness Oppede.




Let us be charmed by these mansions restored and offer a hint of promise even if sentenced to reach the ruins of their neighbors. They lull the visitor the illusion of an aristocratic life scattered among the rags of a village where so many images resonate fantasy.

doors and windows closed in this area desperately condemn me to remain on the border of dream and imagination to flirt with a banquet prepared in large halls like a cathedral and stairwells of pierced stone spiral sporadically loopholes.

(photo: Bea)

(photo: Fred)

(photo: Fred)

Atop Oppede, stands the Collegiate Church, Church superb renovation thanks to the care of a oppédois love with his region and the village, slightly higher still for those who love climbing and flirt with the vacuum, the castle where the only life that filter is the whistling of the mistral rushing into her pierced windows and facades in tatters.

Dolidon Notre Dame atop the village

Dolidon Our Lady of view from the top of the castle

Aerial view of Our Lady of the castle and Dolidon

past, when I climbed the rocky spur to reach the church and castle, and I passed the remains harmonious houses of the village, a profound melancholy overcame me, unstoppable, whirling, without my never know if it was generated by these historical places or if it was my spleen that colored interior of sadness and beauty of these old stones and these stairs overgrown plants.
Now, who flock to the humors me fondle me more. A smile brings his yellow button to my indescribable melancholy because this rise in time of yore, I am the most alone. In my hand was curled another hand delicate and sensitive, that of Beatrice, who accompanied me in my wanderings, and his presence is seen the village grow flowers.

(photo: Fred)