Robert Cahen
Sept Visions Fugitives
“At the beginning of these seven visions, we see a close-up of a child's eye, anonymous but unmistakably Chinese and bridled. And at the end, an ear on a shaved head, undoubtedly of a monk. This child, this bonze are not archetypes, but perceiving subjects, human examples encountered by Cahen in a proliferation of individuals - and their images, let us know how to see it, are not given to us as symbolic or interchangeable, the image of a young Chinese is not valid for all and all the others, or that of a monk for all the others. Cahen shows us well this one and this one alone who was filmed, anonymous but singular, Chinese and very Chinese, but also earthling.In documentaries and fiction, the anonymous individual is often associated, by convention, with the collective and the interchangeable, and China has been the country par excellence stereotypically represented as an anthill, an undifferentiated mass.
We like to watch, in his images, the singular, non-different anonymous person who peoples the world and inhabits it, such a woman who turns on herself and collapses, such a man who walks and walks in the trees.''
Michel Chion
