OMBRE ET LA MAIN (L')

REGARDS SUR UNE RESTAURATION.

of GARRET Laurence

FRANCE, 2006, 00:52:00

Production : CLC Production, MUSEE DU LOUVRE, HISTOIRE, TLM
Collection : Musée du Louvre
Genre : Documentary
Keyword : Art, Louvre Museum, Painting, reenactment, process, studio

Summary :
This documentary talks about the restoration, in the first half of 2006, of a painting by Jean Broc (1771-1850) kept in the reserves of the Louvre. L’École d’Apelle, carried out shortly before 1800, pays tribute to The School of Athens by Raphael, draping in pompous clothes of Antiquity the group of talented and expansive young painters the artist belongs to and who then gravitates in Jacques Louis David's workshop. The camera explores the canvas, each step of restoring allows a historical return to the achievement of the painting. Between the simple cleaning and the painting amendment, the question of the integrity of the artwork arises permanently in this film. "You must always remain slightly on this side of the original", assures the restorer. "Our ethics of restoration is that our intervention in aesthetic could be contested." "A campaign of restoration is a situation favorable to a becoming closer, an intimate relationship to painting. The artwork is large. The painting is 20 square meters. The characters appearing are on a human scale. So there are paint bodies facing the restorers bodies in a frontal link, a theater link. [...] How to shoot painting? Painting fascinates me and yet I can not explain how. Perhaps it is thought in painting that wraps and fixes my gaze. [...] The adventure of the gaze, of the double gaze, close up, from a distance, is the heart of the film. In this claimed freedom not to make an expert movie, space is created to disturb the transparency of the representation and to create a state of affect. The painting transforms thoughts into images, just like cinema, and it is by letting yourself being crossed by these images that emotion comes." (Laurence Garret)

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