Hic Rosa, Botanical Score (2007)

Hidden behind the name of the most famous of flowers there lies a homage. To what? To the color red, to flushing women. To women enraged by justice like Rosa Luxembourg; to women engaged in the austere precision of an art of truth like Danièle Huillet. Because - it is quite clear and the dates in the subtitles in the credits confirm it (1916/1936/2006) - the voices of one or the other cross the "botanical symphony" that reveals the images in sequence. It is the latter's concern for precision that is heard in the diction of the letters written in 1916 by the former. While Rosa Luxembourg is known for having been the heroic organizer Spartacist, who was assassinated by the police in 1919, it is another timbre than that of combative militant that resonates here. "Do you remember what we were planning to do when the war is over?" she writes to one of her correspondents. Such is the subject matter of these letters: the certain memory of the future. The hauntingly insistent reminder of the causes for which the struggle must be led. If a revolution is to be undertaken, and with all the necessary devotion, it is, to exclude oneself from a project bound to the rational. To what end then? To rediscover the gracious and inconsequential innocence of the original garden. To become animal or plant again, nature without fatality. Return, all in all and according to a familiar messianism, to Master Eckhart's famous mystical program "the rose does not have a why". In this first long film, Anne-Marie Faux celebrates the passion of unhindered floral existence without yielding anything to the demands that such an ambition requires.