La ville Louvre

For once, it is not beautifully muscular and long-legged young people in America who are the film stars, but rather a French – shall we say – « lady» of ripe old age, an institution. A certain Jimmy Johnson from San Francisco is said to have got through the entire Louvre in 9 minutes and 45 seconds. Godard’s BANDE A PART managed it even two seconds faster.
Nicolas Philibert takes a more leisurely look. But he too refrains from explanations. He starts by simply taking a close look. His playfully childlike and ingeniously analytical gaze reveals a multi-layered topology of Ville Louvre. He avoids didactics and anecdotes likely to turn the museum visit into a painful experience we remember well from our school excursion days.
Philibert looks mainly behind the scenes and at the layers of hierarchy. He makes structures and processes visible. His narrative style and rhetoric tend more towards musical or dancelike forms. They take shape through his specific interest in details and expand thanks to ever surprising perspectives.
For example, when following the step-by-step procedure of what it means to professionally install a canvas measuring roughly five by twenty metres, we may perhaps be reminded of Egon Erwin Kisch’s report about the flight of Louvre treasures from the Germans in the summer of 1940. We start to get an idea of the energy involved, and we understand why: the Louvre is a star the «grande nation» will simply never give up.
Visions du Réel Nyon