Apres la mort, après la vie

Olivier Deprez

FRMK, book is in French

Story all in woodcut. One endless night, Doctor A. and Nurse O. stroll through the labyrinthine meanders of an old barracks. Locked up in this ghostly decor with pale lights, they seek each other, find each other the better to get lost. Oscillating between abstraction and figuration, absence and presence, death and life, reality deforms and becomes a nightmare. To ward off the darkness, the characters materialize it by engraving. To fight against their anguish, they film it. It is from this permanent dialogue between the page and the screen, the engraving and the cinema, that the ambivalence of After Death, After Life is born. A central motif, the projection, whether of bodies, fantasies, of the book or of the film, immediately posits the story as a cinematographic act. Opposite and complementary doubles, A and O are both readers and spectators of the book-film they create by inscribing their mark, their voice, their very body in the hollow of the engraving. From the ink roller to the film rolls that zigzag from box to box, from railway tracks to the wheels of the hearse, the circularity of the drawing here allows a constantly renewed mise en abyme of the creative act, from engraving to the table. disassembly.