Merciless Diaries. The 2000s/ Masculine: Irène, Alain Cavalier

In 1972, Alain Cavalier had to face up to the death of his wife, Irène. The successful director then decided to turn his back on the film industry. From then on, in the following years, he has produced an ascetic body of work that fluctuates between the unnameable and the burlesque, in film diary form. Irène is the fifth and final chapter of the autobiographical cycle started in 1978. In this film he tables a series of basic questions: how to render visible an absence that is a presence for oneself, and how to face the ghosts of the past by means of a camera and lay them to rest.

Irène, A. Cavalier, France, 2009, 35 mm, 85’