I'm a Heroine of the Peripheral (2021)

Too far to the right, too far to the left, says the man in the foreground with the camera. Muriel Montini is a heroine, as she looks back on her life, recorded in her films. But because she was careful not to be at the centre, these autobiographical traces may now become the starting point for fiction, for self-fiction. Peripheral heroine. But what to place in the centre? The blackness of passing time, the night that we fear to enter all too soon, which devours friends and lovers, all our life stories. From the rushes amassed over the years, Muriel Montini extracts fragments of memories, drawing, around the obscure centre, the constellation of time lost and found. Faces in full light, backlit movements, curtains like funereal shrouds over bodies and images, freeze-frames that fix the grain of the film in the dust of oblivion. A winter journey across the ocean of memory. The montage of attachments cultivates secrecy: only the intensity, from the life stories remains only the vivacity of impulses. The self-portrait diffuses through amorous conversations, in the half-obscured figures of anonymous passers-by, in the faces or steps of other film heroines: Aurore Clément filmed by Akerman, Simone Simon turning into a cat, Domiziana Giordano hand stretched out to a man who, at the end of Nouvelle Vague (New wave), saves her from drowning. "Only cinema allows Orpheus to turn around without killing Eurydice". Muriel Montini's film is a vivid and melancholic demonstration of the Godardian theorem. (Cyril Neyrat)