Nostalgie de la Boue

Nostalgie de la Boue, meaning ‘longing for the mud’, is the metaphoric expression of a desire to return to more rudimental social conditions or behaviour to which a person is accustomed. The first appearance of this saying was in Le Mariage d’Olympe from Emile Augier in 1855.

The feature film Nostalgie de la Boue (2014-2016) relates the epic journey of hundreds of isolated people walking in deserts. Made exclusively with found footage taken from worldwide cinema, thousands of sequences have been edited and turned into new narratives where protagonists interact with each other without ever meeting. Although the paths of each character never converge, their thoughts suggested within mere looks and wordless exchanges give a hint of communication and interactions.

Entirely void of dialogue, the original audio has been deleted and sensitively replaced with an original soundscape composed from library, atmospheric and Foley sounds in collaboration with sound artist Doug Haywood. At times, it reproduces subtly what is happening on screen, or it transports us miles away from the actual action, in a faraway town, in a dream, an hallucination or within the room where one is sited and the film is projected at the moment.

The fulfilment of this scenario lays in the audience’s engagement with it. There is constant investigation on the relationship and positioning between all participants of the filmic : the cameraman, and camera, the film crew, the actors, the spectator, the screen. This allows viewers to interpret visual imagery and sound through a combined perception of different proxemics. Sometimes, the landscapes is empty, and the spectator from the audience, in turn, becomes the lonely traveler watching for someone or something to appear.