Isabelle Prim
Mademoiselle Else - Film - 2010
présenté dans le cadre de l'exposition Panorama 12
Film
Else is an adaptation in video of Fräulein Else, a novel by Arthur Schnitzler. It is the account in the first person of the last days of a young girl from a good family who, on holiday in the Alps, has to ask Dorsday, an old art agent and bon-vivant for money to help her father, a Viennese lawyer ridden with debts. Dorsday asks in exchange to be allowed to admire her nude. The role of Dorsday is played by Jean-Pierre Beauviala, the inventor of the hand-held video camera and time code in film cameras. It is he who gives Else the measuring device. It is this camera, both technological artificial limb and magic mirror, that will record and cultivate the heroine's dilemma. Hence the necessity for me to be both the actor and director of the film. The role of the father is held by Colonel Manchot, my grand-father, a well-known political figure in his time, who died in 1971. His role is carried out from archive images that Else will try to bring to life with absurd rituals, a sign of her guilty conscience. The scenes shot in the Alps break up the story to allow Else to distance herself from the rest of the film shot in the studio, a dark room that becomes the recipient of the various mental projections of the young girl. These two different environments enable us to understand the comings and goings in the Else who weighs herself up and Else who weighs up the situation. As it is indeed at Else's level, around sexual benchmarks, that Schnitzler develops his critique of liberalism.
