Narrative essay
75mn (2004)

After 15 years making films, the filmmaker, Françoise Romand, decides to return the camera onto her. She took advantage of a year's teaching stint at Harvard to began "Theme Je" ("The Camera I"). Watch this forty something Parisian lady lose her way in other hearts and other cities, by turns mischievous and gnashing her teeth, making up games of chance and a family secret along the way. She feeds bleeding chunks of herself into your mirror. An experiment in DV that flirts with the Webcam to raise issues of cinema. 

"Established documentary and fiction filmmaker Françoise Romand started noodling around – as did so many people – with her digital camera in a diary format. She began filming her mother and then turned the camera on herself in a moment of hesitation just before leaving her Paris apartment for a one-year teaching gig at Harvard University. Three months later in Boston, she passed the camera to a friend who finished the tape without knowing what Romand had shot, but his images rhymed uncannily with hers. From there, the film evolved into an essay-diary, charting the vicissitudes of one talented, troubled and loving soul’s attempts to understand herself and the elusive, enigmatic delicacies of relationships.

The title, Thème Je, is a play on words; although the meaning is that of literary self-reflection (“I” as the theme of the piece), it is a twist on je t’aime or “I love you.” Unpredictable, abstract, fragmented and ultimately unresolved, the film charges full tilt at the frontiers of personal cinema."
- Kay Armatage

"Declensions of "I" with accents of provocation in view of politically incorrect and resolutely unjustified thinking. A film about fantasised reality. The film I never thought I would dare to make.
At opposite poles from a narrative where everything is said and/or shown, the film is about our daily discontents and babblings, which I have tried to confront for myself. How we question our life choices, that are so much a part of our creativity, how a film unfolds both a personal and a universel history.
A film which bothers me, and which grates on the spectator instead seeking the satisfaction-confirmation of liberal ideas.
This is the quality I look for in the films I go to see, unpredictable films which face the risk of failure, films that question their form as well as their meaning. Mine is an indiscreet film which wants to know where we have to stand to have the right to be indiscreet.
As it grew, the home movie became a public film, a history which is evident in the film itself, since some sequences were not shot in 16/9.
At the origine of the film was a tape containing materiel I shot with my mother during the summer of 1999 and shots of myself in love standing before a mirror in Paris before moving to the US for one year to be a teacher at Harvard. Three months later in Boston, David Larcher finished my tape not knowing what was on it with shots of him self standing in front of a mirror. This perfect parallèle evokes the way a soul tries to understand itself the better to deal with that unknown quantity, the Other.
I think of it as something like a literary essay, a first person exploration of the frontiers of cinema."

Shot from 1999 to 2003 in Paris (Montmartre), London, Boston, La Ciotat

With
Philou
Isabelle Vorle
David Larcher
Françoise Romand
Jean-Pierre Békolo
Marie-Laure Tollet
Aldo Sperber
Olivia Ekelund
José-Maria Berzosa
Rose Romand
Girailh Kapamadjian
Jean-Claude Romand
JJ Birgé as the Joker

« Found » footage from David Larcher

Image et son
Françoise Romand

Montage
Julien Basset
Françoise Romand
Fabio Balducci

Mixage
Carl Goetgheluck

Exposition
Isabelle Vorle (on friday "Lust")

Traduction
Noël Burch
Sous-titrages
Lenny Burger
Patty Hannock

Thanks to Maguy Alziari, Travis Kunce, Guylaine Monnier, Hervé Gaulier, François de Morant, Tapages, William Lamonica, Marie Cool, Sophie Erkelbout, Annie Mignot, Rémy Sebire, Alfred Guzzetti Harvard University

Ce film a obtenu la bourse« Brouillon d’un rêve » de la SCAM

Alibi Productions Olivier Berne
mail : alibifilms@wanadoo.fr
© 2004

www.themeje.org