During a trip to China with Vincent to meet people in art schools and universities, I discovered the work of Deng Guo Yan, the director of the Tianjin school of contemporary art. A painting style that seemed to me to be a mix of traditional Chinese painting, Claude Monet and Cy Twombly, and which I liked. The black and white of his large ink brush paintings on paper, almost the size of a mural, made it possible for me to jump from black and white to colour in this film, as I had done in the Recueil but with other connotations: with excerpts from Jean Renoir in Aline Cézanne, photos of Le Havre destroyed in Papa, Maman, Perret et moi, and infrared images taken by Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt in Le Paysage pour témoin”.
Pierre CretonDirector