Un homme sans l'Occident, 2002, Raymond Depardon

Premiere:

"Un homme sans l'Occident" by Raymond Depardon

February 26 and 27, 2004
 
Regular Austrian cinemas seem to be finding less and less room for new works by significant international filmmakers. Un homme sans L'Occident (2003), the third feature created by French documentarist and photographer Raymond Depardon, is a case in point. It will now receive its Austrian premiere at the Film Museum. As in his other fictional works – Empty Quarter (1985) and La Captive du Désert (1990) – Un homme sans L'Occident confronts a Western, "colonial" viewpoint with the African desert landscape – but this time seen from an inverse perspective. It is the perspective of an Africanwho experiences the arrival of the white man (and thus the beginning of the end of his world) at the end of the 19th century. The severe, crystalline beauty of Depardon's radiant desert images forms a transcendent counterbalance to the lyrical, mystical poetry of nature in the works of Nicholas Ray.