Parfum de lumière

A dream as only memory can dream it, the first film by the great Quebec photographer Serge Clément weaves together a fragmented portrait of an imaginary city by playing with several aspects of superimposition (both literal and figurative), which come together to create an admirable balance between content and form.

Clément's photographs are like a window of the soul studded with shards of tinted glass that offers a delicate balance between reflection and transparency, interior and exterior, modesty and indiscretion, proximity and distance, being and appearing. While the personal world dissolves in the impersonality of the world, the city as a physical and symbolic space, the light pierces, is offset, refracted or reflected on this psychic border sown with lakes of shadow. The work, which is a cinematic extension of an exhibition and book of the same name, adds to this game of dissolution by superimposing photographs on each other, sometimes within a pixilation sequence.

In this film woven of traces and sensory imprints, in which Clément and his excellent editor Fernand Bélanger take pleasure in blurring the tracks of memory, the eye clings to the reliefs and textures (grain, patterns, streaks and blurs), while the mind wanders to the rich sound montage enhanced by Jean Derome's haunting music. The synesthetic reference to Baudelaire's Exotic Perfume ("Guided by your fragrance to these charming countries / I see a port filled with sails and rigging"), is surely not alien...

Richard Brouillette
Savior, filmmaker, producer, chicken farmer, and accountant