Tren de Sombras

On November 8, 1930, a Paris lawyer, Gérard Fleury, left his home at dawn in search of the right light in which to complete a landscape film around Lake Thuit. That day, he died in circumstances that have never been fully explained. Three months earlier, he had made one of his modest home movies : aplayful, summery film shot in the sun-drenched gardens of the Le Thuit château – akind of earthly paradise with no historical context other than that of nostalgia for those  » artificials paradises  » created by time. We wanted to find a meaning behind these images. First, we had to locate them. We found the tiny municipality of Le Thuit, in upper Normandy. Here was the lake, the château, the garden, which, curiously, extended by the floral decorations as in a still life, stretched into the house. At dusk, a ray of light filtering through the blinds, strikes the clock in such a way that the pendulum’s movement casts an irregular glimmer on the photo of Mister Fleury. This fleeting, illusive flicker, the product of chance or a conspiracy between time and light, calls for a new look at these old images…