“The Little Characters”, “The Lighthouse Keepers”, “Hard Land”… Our reading choices

THE MORNING LIST

Travel is honored in the books of the week. Interior when it comes to diving into the heart of the engine room of American fitter Paul Hirsch. Intimate through the delicate stories told by Marie Sizun in The Little Characters. Immobile during the incredible disappearance of the keepers of a lost lighthouse, of which Emma Stonex holds the oppressive chronicle. Initiation, finally, in the footsteps of a teenager from the Midwest discovering love and mourning in Hardlandby Benedict Wells.

MEMOIRS. “A long time ago, in an editing room far, far away…”, by Paul Hirsch

Litany of anecdotes, name dropping, nostalgia for the good old days: the Artists’ Memoirs sometimes turn into an evening with an old uncle. Without claiming to renew the genre, those of the editor Paul Hirsch nevertheless differ from it.

Firstly because his career is punctuated by prestigious collaborations – Carrie at the Devil’s Ball (1976) and ten other films by Brian De Palma, Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977), The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980)… Then because Paul Hirsch devotes a large number of pages to his practice of editing, halfway between geek craftsman and film athlete.

The book is valid for those moments in the engine room watching the fitter toil in this physical work: “A lot of film editing was based on muscle reflexes. » If the cinema is, etymologically, the art of movement, it is revealed here that of a certain gymnastics. Pierre-Edouard Peillon

NEW. “The Little Characters”, by Marie Sizun

You have to pass the frame. Slowly allow the edges to fade and enter the picture. So, we can, invisible spectator, sink step by step into the decor. Big trees, alleys, paths, gardens, riversides or vast beaches, some deserted towns, sometimes. There is no living soul. Or so little, or so far. We barely see silhouettes as if swallowed up in the landscape.

Who are these people, these characters to whom, if we had remained on the other side of the frame, we would not have paid attention? Marie Sizun went to meet them. To these sketches, to these incongruous presences, she gave a story. Hanging around thirty short stories on as many canvases. And now a singular breath of life crosses the painting. Sad or happy souls, worried, delighted, in love.

It is an affair of separated lovers in a red chalk by Fragonard, an old woman and her young governess advancing on the horizon of the White cloudd’Ensor, or an abandoned dog seen from the Mortlake Terrace, by Turner. Marie Sizun, writer of erased destinies, signs here a collection full of emotions, attentive tenderness. Xavier Houssin

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