à

Monsieur Bill Gates

Service des Relations Extérieures de Bill Gates

Microsoft France

18 avenue de Québec

91957 Courteboeuf

Paris, le jeudi 5 juillet 2001

Dear Bill Gates,

First, let me please introduce myself : I am a film maker (my main film La momie à mi-mots won the Andreï Tarkovski price for artistic creation and cinematographical language and was screened in many places in the world. I send you a press-book). I am also " doctor in art and sciences of art (cinema-television) " from the Sorbonne University where I teach cinema. I am also a painter (many exhibitions).

This is now why I write to you : I had a little " sponsor " from your company Microsoft France one year ago by Mrs Maggy Guez who accepted to give me Windows 2000 and Frontpage. For that reason I put " Thank you to Microsoft France " at the end of many multimedia works and films I’ve finished.

I just come back from the United Nations in New York where my film La momie à mi-mots  was screened.

At this occasion, I presented also to the cultural association from the UN which invited me a book : I edited this book with the help of many companies and with the little help from Microsoft France (it is written at the end of the book).

The president of this association would like to make an exhibition of this book and my work as a painter at the United Nations, more precisly at the main entrance of the UN (you know that the UN is one of the most visited building). I send you details about this exhibition apart.

It is a book about a real piano I covered with paintings (miniatures) during 2 years. The exhibition will include around the piano, poems from Michèle Finck, professor at Strasbourg University (poems translated in the book in the officials languages of the UN), painting and music (you can look the project itself join here).

I would like to show you this book when you’ll come in Paris. May be you would like to help me to make this exhibition at the UN, if you like the book and my work. If you help me I can write it, of course, during the exhibition and in the film I will make of the exhibition.

Best Regards

Laury Granier

MUMBO-JUMBO

About Mummy Mommy, by Laury Granier

At first glance, Laury Granier's self-proclaimed mumbo-jumbo is adorned with all the seduction of nostalgia. His Luxembourg gardens have all the soft and lightly faded colours of childhood memories. Laury Granier's images are rooted in his experience of Paris in the early sixties, as when he recalls the picturesque characters of Thursday afternoon outings: the candy-floss peddler, the tramp throwing bread crumbs to the birds and the merry-go-rounds. The cleverly old fashioned, melancholic charm of the piece will remind the film enthusiast of the Ballon Rouge by Albert Lamorisse.

Yet the accelerating staccato of images keeps us from yielding to the sweet pleasures of nostalgia. It is not the simple charm of memories which causes Laury to transfigure the Luxembourg gardens, but the fierce breath of dreams and poetic fantasy. Carolyn Carlson is not Julie Andrews after all. And this secret garden also sets the stage for some tragic scenes, mysterious rituals and wonderful hallucinations.

As in a dream, the plot is simple, eclectic and yet linear : the persecution, agony, mummification and resurrection of a ballerina. As in a dream, the plot develops into a profusion of meaningful details, staging objects and masks whose symbolism remains vague at first, in a ballet of richly coloured and mysterious characters. As in a dream, the story allows for humour (hilarious Jean Rouch, placid Magi among the children's sandpits), for the incongruous (a hunting party on a merry-go-round ) and for the fantastic (Pegasus at full gallop on the Champ de Mars). As in a dream, finally, the subtlety of the narrative lies also in the enthralling evocative power of these images.

Laury Granier's oneiric aesthetics gives Mummy a special place in the history of surrealist cinema. Living up to this tradition Laury Granier makes the most of a flea market that would not look out of place in a Duchamp painting. Eccentric objects - finely worked keys, multi-coloured kites, exotic masks - are presented alongside masterful performances in unusual arts (Yo-yoand French horn players, riders and acrobats). Nothing gratuitous here! On the one hand, this cheerful bric-a-brac contributes to the euphoric atmosphere of the movie. On the other hand, the editing virtuosity, pointing to symbolic intentions, allow these apparitions to retain an other-worldly dignity. Along their quest to find the means of reviving the ballerina, the characters come across sudden and beautiful apparitions, which contrast with the hypnotic pace of the narrative. In so doing the film gives strong visual emotions. Laury Granier excels in exploiting the element of surprise, and in impressing arresting images upon our minds. As the quest brings some of the characters to the dome of the Observatory, which they have to climb, a bunch of vivid gladiolas set against the background of the dome strikes the imagination.

However, in order to transcend the fantastic and give this tale the more tormented accent its director wanted to express, something else was needed. For Laury Granier, no single technical or aesthetic approach was able to suggest the dark side of his dream. This is why Mummy Mommy is also a dance and music drama. From the very beginning, a quick succession of camera shots reveal Carolyn Carlson dancing, suffused with electric light. Some of the most striking scenes of the movie, which punctuate the more fateful moments, find their poignant beauty in the graceful improvisations of the ballerina. Accompanied by bewitching music, she is able to suggest the torments of her agony, as well as the religious mystery surrounding her embalming. So much so that at the end, during an overwhelming resurrection dance, the mummy takes off her cotton rags and, like a pagan priestess, pays an inspired tribute to love and to life, while dancing around the sculpted horse crowning the Carpeaux fountain, set in the gardens of the Observatory.

A dreamlike movie, a danced drama, but also a silent movie. Adding to the splendid originality of Laury Granier's film, written panels reinforce the majors scenes with humour. Playing, as always, on two levels - the visually stunning and the allegorical - these inserts translated in over a dozen languages, and in almost as many alphabets, not only add a humorous touch, but are also indicative of Laury Granier's searchfor a universal language.

Indeed, Laury Granier's final ambition is clearly none other that to use his camera, his memories and his imagination to trace the first words of this universal language. The ultimate paradox of this movie might very well be that having challenged the conventions of cinematographic language, it manages to move us, whatever our cultural background, in its own, highly idiosyncratic way.

"The belief in the rituals of life, the smallest and most insignificant aspects of life, of real life, that is, is such that it eventually destroys the meaning of life". It is by agreeing to cast off such a vain belief that Laury Granier was able, after seven years of effort, to complete his crazy and enlightening Mumbo-Jumbo project. Seven years to free his creative power from the tyranny of clichés, to cast off the pressing constraints of conventional production, and to re-invent, mastering them, the rules taught in film-making school.

André Breton, astute visionary, feared that imagination would tire of being neglected and misused, and would abandon man to a future without light. Some of today's cinematographic composition would lend credence to this pessimistic prophecy. Much to our relief, and to our great pleasure, Mummy Mommy is a shining exception.

Laurent Burin des Roziers

Published in Turbulences Vidéo, n.14, January 1997

Translation into english: Christophe Cuny, Laure Fournier, Catherine Pradeille

It is difficult to add anything to Mumbo Jumbo, Laurent Burin des Roziers' beautiful commentary of Laury Granier's Mummy Mommy, published in the January issue of Turbulences Vidéo. I can only bear witness to the most striking impressions the film made on me.

I was struck by the extraordinary freshness of the fantasy world inhabited by the ballerina, who is brought back to life in this story told with such wonderful crispness.The film shines as a message of hope, a call to rebirth and love. The ballerina, first torn by anguish, is delivered through an initiation to a Mystery of light (a mystery in the sense of a religious or esoteric ritual, as in the Eleusinian mysteries).

The film's montage is a masterpiece of subtlety and poetry. Laury Granier's images fulfil the most rigorous demands of thought and imagination, thanks to his virtuosity. Everything becomes music. The film itself is impregnated with sounds, carried by the musical score. Everything is dance, nothing is superfluous. The only form of verbal commentary Laury Granier allows himself are the inserts preceding each sequence.

Paul Klee would have adored this film. He would have been delighted by its colour, by its musicality, by its fade-ins, where colour and sound merge harmoniously.

The photography is absolutely superb. "Poetic scissors" were applied to the editing. It is a beautiful film, a film with a future. If the world surrealist comes to mind, it is not so much to remind us of a moment in the history of art and ideas, as to express the astonishing strength of this New Age of the Imagination, transfiguring images of reality to revive in us the fire of poetry and universal emotion.

Adelina Rodolico Gariglio, Mondovi, 21 March 1997

translation into english Christophe Cuny and Catherine Pradeille

On a breezy and rare clear day last fall in the Jardin du Luxembourg, at the side of the Palais, several strollers stood gaping up at a chestnut tree where, high above them, two men were rapelling. They were dressed in workman's clothes, so they were probably working as they trapezed from one branch to the next. But their aplomb was that of performers; or perhaps that the civilians regarded them as an audience might inspired them to comport themselves like cirque stars.

The scene was just one example of how art and life in France don't just intermingle, but are in a way inseparable. You see it in the way the boulangerie attendant, who has the most conservative of demeanors, takes advantage of this strange American holiday Halloween to paint a bright orange and black jack-o-lantern on her face. You see it when you descend the stairs of a toilette near the church Madeleine, and there find not only mahogony urinals and stalls, but a well-coiffed, matronly woman watching over them, as the aching strains of Edith Piaf issue from her radio. "Merci," she says, after you're done. And you see it most of all in the monuments, statues, arches, and fountains that are everywhere in Paris. Every time I got lost, it seems, I turned around and there was a statue of Joan of Arc. One late afternoon returning from the Sarah Bernhardt exhibit at the old Bibliotheque Nationale, I rounded a corner and there was Moliere, in a fountain. Not mobbed with tourists...just kind of there. Art exudes in the rushing and rippling of the Seine, too, and in the bridges and ponts that demarcate it, and the street merchant stalls that line it on either side. And of course it's there in the artful displays of the outdoor marches.

For an art-lover like me, one of the hardest parts of returning to the U.S. from France was to adjust to the way we confine our art. It's in museums, in boxes, caged, something we appreciate looking at, but not that surrounds our daily life as much as it does in Paris. And where it does, it's terribly confined and restricted. Have you ever seen a nude statue in NYC??? I mean, not in a museum, but just out on the street? They're all clothed, the contours of their bodies muddled. Statues give heft and permanance to the beauty of the human body; when they're naked, they're eternal. Our statues, at least here in NYC, are very prim and proper. And it isn't just the old ones. Last year, the city sponsored a city-wide "cow" fest, in which artists submitted proposals to do up and dress up cows according to various themes. The New York State Arts Council was initially asked to jury the submissions, but bowed out when it was told it couldn't select any works that related to social, political, or sexual topics. "What else is there?" an exasperated NYSCA panelist told me.

Statues, and dance, and the Luxembourg Garden, and the Seine, and Dante, and strange wonderful music from strange found objects, and yo-yos even, play roles in Laury Granier's "La Momie a Mi-Mots," a throwback of a film I caught last night at the Dag Hammarksjold Auditorium of the United Nations, where it was screened by the Association Culturelle Francophone, with the assistance of the French Embassy. It's really a multi-generational, multi-genre, seemingly organic happening caught on film. The central, whimsical and at the same time grave figure is played by Carolyn Carlson, a legendary dancer with the late Alwin Nikolais's LATE company (it's time to let that cat out of the bag, folks; while the Martha Graham company's travails are at least due to an internal struggle, the Nikolais-Louis company has self-imploded apparently because its beloved director, justly tired, would rather the company give up the ghost than turn the reigns over to others) who went on to direct the Paris Opera Ballet. (Talk about multi-genre! The best analogy would be if the directors of Pilobolus or Moses Pendleton were suddenly made directors of the New York City Ballet.)

I don't know if I want to be so presumptuous as to sketch a "plot" for the movie. Better I think to share the images which remain. The film is really a passage. We know this because of handy-dandy, multi-lingual subtitles which highlight the journey, but also because of the constantly swirling, ascending, descending, swooping Carlson. At the Jardin, she picks up a Statue of Liberty mask, dances around with it through some paths for a while, then ceremoniously places it in a pond, where it promptly turns over and sinks. Up on a roof, a friar-looking man lays gold bowl after gold bowl on the edges of the roof, of different sizes, before striking them as bells. Nearby, a man determinedly yo-yos the same pattern, over and over. Later -- perhaps after the Carlson figure has "passed on" -- passengers, in speeded-up frames, board rowboats that are launched out onto the Seine by a man in a carnival mask, as a band plays horns and burns flares on the river bank. The scene, which seems lit by candles, of course evokes Dante's journey and the journey on the River Styx. Back at another garden, in the shadow of the Eifell Tower, Young girls grab onto ropes dangling from a sort of carousel and turn it by running in circles, as a mother looks on approvingly. Then they assemble and paste together sheets of maps -- I was reminded of a whole platform at the Luxembourg where a map of the world is laid out at your feet, and tourists walk over it pointing to where they live -- which morph into rectangular map kites. Watching is a figure on a bench, covered in paper and wearing a Chinese dragon mask. She removes it -- it's Carlson, who then ascends one of those beautiful fountains. This one has spouting turtles at its base, then massive stallions, topped by a ring of naked women and I think a man, too. As Carlson climbs it, they eventually start spouting, in all sorts of different patterns. (See, in Paris, nothing is taking for granted, the artistic opportunities in every design explored and exploited. The fountains are no exception; the Stravinsky fountain in back of the Pompidou center is comprised of what might be called cartoon figures, some of found objects which turn mechanically; the timing and shape of all the water sprays is different. In another fountain, near the city's Vietnam-town, there are no such fancy objects, but the plain spigots still go off canonically.)

The film began simply, with Carlson in a studio, in only warm-up clothes, stretching as you might do. By the end she is transformed into a water sylph, at home in a strange environment peopled with the fairy-tale creatures of modern life. No matter how marvelous her surroundings get, Carlson easily moves from open-mouth marvel to "owning" her environment. The dancer is as at home among this epic and folk art, the strange music, and the eccentric characters. As at home, you might say, as dance and art are in the wider culture in France.

And there's no reason you can't get in on this, American Dance Insider! The official festival circuit can be a tough noir to crack in France, but have you considered the unofficial route? Pittsburgh-based Attack Theater's Michele de la Reza and Peter Kope know the way to Avignon, and that's it! Working with producers Pascal Keiser and Sabine Voegtlin, who produce several events at Avignon's off festival, and eclectic virtuoso (of violin, cello, and several other instruments) David Eggar, Attack lays siege this summer to Avignon's Quartier urbain Place Crillon, where its "Some Assembly Required," a process improvisation performance, will wind its way down the rue Petite Fusterie, bringing its audience with it from gallery to gallery. Performers will feed off the audience, who will in turn feed off the art on the walls of the galleries. This piece, previously performed at the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Frick Museum in Pittsburgh, as well as London's Tate Gallery, runs in Avignon from July 16 to 28.

Main festival attractions, dance-wise, include Jan Fabre's "Je Suis Sang" (I am Blood), all about, yes, blood. And " Le temps du repli" (Time for Withdrawal), by France Moves festival hit Josef Nadj. Nadj desscribes the work by citing the words of Octavio Paz: "'To love is perhaps to learn how to walk in this world." In this dance, he says, "The couple contains the potential for all dramas because it carries with it original sin. Something was broken in the primordial couple of Genesis. In this show we try to stick the pieces back together again."

While you're in the neighborhood, why not hop on the TGV to Montpellier, about an hour away? There's the festival of course, which this year features the Merce Cunningham company, plus a new work by Mathilde Monnier on dancers from the Royal Swedish Ballet, Jiri Kylian's "Colorful Black and White," and more. Here to there's an underground festival. "Plug & Pray -- Phase 1.2 : musique -- danse-- arts plastiques -- video" takes over La Chapelle, a church space, June 25, 26, and 27. Artists include Jean-François Blanquet, Nessim Bismuth, François Ceccaldi, Delphine Chomel, Marion Diagues, Eve Diagues, Eve Jouret, Fréderic Khodja, Claire Menguy, Leonardo Monteccia, Bastien Paquier, Laurent Pichaud, Christophe Brombin, Emmanuelle Santos, Etienne Schwarcz, and Eric Vaquer.

"Pasolini spoke of a poetic cinema in contrast to a cinema of prose. Poetry! Poetry is everywhere in Mummy Mommy, first to be found in the rush of images and in the dazzle of the montage. (...) This film is like none other today, and that is why it appeals to me and moves me."

(Jean-Paul Rappeneau, director of Cyrano among others, President of the Cinémathèque Française)

"I thank Laury Granier for this film. It is curious and poetic and it deserves showing in the "underground" world. It gives much light and optimism which is so needed in the world today!"

(Carolyn Carson, Star-ballerina and star-choreographer at the Paris Opera, 5 March 1996. )

"(...) With exemplary enthusiasm, Laury Granier launched a formidable assault against the fortress of film making. As Merlin led the knights of the round table into their adventures, Laury Granier defeated the curses and outsmarted the snares of film production, persuading one of the greatest dancers of our time to enter into the spirit of his Mumbo-Jumbo in the process. (...) Laury Granier has invented assault course editing (...)"

(Jean Rouch, film director, ex-President of the Cinémathèque Française, Professor of Cinema and Ethnology at Paris X, ethnologist, 10 December 1995 )

"(...) This film is the product of an intense thought process on the subject of editing: 1400 shots in 42 minutes (which is considerable, as a feature film will on average contain 600). The result is an intricate web of images and rhythms which give the film a dreamlike quality. The film draws on all forms of art: sculpture, architecture, dance, writing, painting, video-art and music (original music composed by Leonard Berstein's ex-Harpist at the New York Philharmonic, Margaret Brill, and by Alain Kremski, Olivier Lliboutry and Michel Deneuve)."

(in ErNeSt hebdo.96, weekly of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, n.19, February 1996)

"(...) This film is an initiation fairy tale, danced entertainment, straight out of its author's fantasies, on the themes of mummification and rebirth. The director conducted his work as the painter of miniatures, dividing his film into nine chapters preceded by written panels, translated into thirteen languages. Talking about his reflection of the rituals of agony and death, the director asks: 'Isn't film making a modern form of mummification and rebirth?'"

(in Catalogue du festival du film d'art de l'UNESCO, December 1996).

"(...) Laury Granier successfully confronted the problems of shooting and particularly of editing, constantly refining his work. (...)"

(Jean Gili, Professor of Cinema at La Sorbonne, critic and writer (The history of Italian cinema), 13 January 1996)

" (...) Laury Granier's gigantic chimera has seen the light of day at last, and he deserves great praise for it. His film takes us back to the golden age of the avant-garde, in the mid-twenties, when cinema was still an art, in the hands of poets. Mummy Mommy could also be called, by reference to Jean Cocteau: "The song of a poet".

(Claude Beylie, Professor of film making at La Sorbonne, film critic, 13 January 1996)

"(...) Laury Granier's film is a magic lamp: it spreads a supernatural light upon the bodies of the characters, metamorphosing them, and draws us into a strange and magical dance. (...) This film leaves us with a deep and striking impression, the impression of having had contact with pure energy, a euphoric impression, in stark contrast with any intellectual discourse. In the story told in the film, a mummy is brought back to life, anguish is exorcised and, at the end, we come to believe that we too have found once more the wild freedom of youth."

(Michelle Finck, writer, poet, script writer, professor in comparative literature at Strasbourg University, in Poésie et danse à l'époque moderne, Armand Colin)

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