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Isabelle aux Dombes (S) (S)

5.6

47

Ratings

Original title: Isabelle aux Dombes
Year: 1951
Running time: 9 min.
Country: France
Director: Maurice Pialat
Screenwriter: Maurice Pialat
Cast: Paulette Malan
Cinematography: Maurice Pialat (B&W)
Genre: Drama | Short Film. Silent Film
Synopsis: Pialat's first film was the 8-minute short Isabelle aux Dombes, shot in 1951 when the director was 26 years old. The film is an entirely silent montage of documentary footage, ragged experimental techniques — mainly some negative-image inserts — and symbolic psychodrama that's surprisingly not too different from the work that Stan Brakhage would begin making just a year or two later. A car speeds through the countryside. A horse chews amiably in closeup while a thick carpet of flies crawls and flutters all over its face, even clustering around its eyes. A bird flies backward, the image reversed, and then Pialat cuts abruptly to an image of a dead bird hanging from a power line.

Images of death proliferate throughout the film, and what started as a loose documentary soon becomes an eerie psuedo-horror piece that's obsessed with death and decay. The woman seen as a car passenger at the beginning of the film is soon stalked by a mysterious man, chasing her in negative-image, and then she reappears as an avatar of death in a black robe, her figure reflected in a wavering pool of water. In blurry, creepy images, her eyes are scarred over by tissue that blinds her, her lips moving silently, repeating some incantation. By the end of the film, she resembles Charon, rowing across the river Styx, an avatar of death. The film is vague and mysterious in its meaning, simply evoking a creepy atmosphere through the grim, stark images and the way Pialat jams them together through his choppy editing.

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User history

Isabelle aux Dombes (S) (S)

1951

Maurice Pialat

5.6

(47)