Raymonde Carasco

The movie shows a smattering of images from the story of Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva. The subject is sublimated desire. (imdb)

This film chronicles a meeting: that of the Tarahumara Indians and a camera that looks at the people that are etymologically called "foot runners." Musical montage: steps rhythms, traditional gestures and postures.

Joa (Bulle Ogier), an archaeologist from Mexico, comes to Paris in search of her sister Anna (Mireille Perrier), of whom she is suddenly without news. Anna, a theater actress, was in the title role in Sade’s “Justine” when she disappeared. The investigation leading Joa to the people who have known her sister, turns into an initiatory quest. Her journey, her stroll through a subterranean marginal Paris, leads also to the emergence of a new woman.

This film was shot in summer 1979. The repeated ritual of Tutuguri that Tranquilino the saweame sang and danced six times in a short, strictly accurate duration. Secret words from which only emerge vowels, dance that builds a sacred space between the four cardinal points of a cross, a black and pagan sign. A native solar rite, prior to the Spanish conquest. The assembly here builds in a single plane the two poles of real time and an expanded space-time, from dual material: Tutuguri and Carreras.

To mark the celebrations of Holy Week, the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico invented (or found) dance-rites in which men paint the face and body. Passion processions depict two kinds of “fariseos” (Pharisees): some dressed in white and crudely daubed with chalk; others, almost naked–feather helmets wearers–fully marked with large white spots. (Letterboxd)