Rêve et Folie

Directed by

Claude Régy

© Pascal Victor

With Rêve et Folie, Claude Régy concludes his exploration of the utmost bounds of language. His encounter with the works of Maeterlinck, Duras, Meschonnic, Sarraute, Kane and Vesaas have enabled him to express the elusive and the unsayable; and their writings are an admission of helplessness and a refusal to conform to rationality and intelligibility. The life of Georg Trakl, the Austrian poet whose searing existence was interrupted at the age of 27, was marked by transgressions and the violation of taboos. Aware of his own madness and guilt-ridden following his incest with his sister, he became obsessed with his own destruction. He died of a cocaine overdose in 1914, while serving as a military pharmacist on one of the bloodiest fronts of the Great War. The contradictions of his life converge in his poetic language: sentences shock together, images collide, and opposites are assembled to form strange associations. “Le mot dans sa paresse cherche en vain à saisir au vol / L’insaisissable que l’on touche dans le sombre silence / Aux frontières ultimes de notre esprit.” With this long poem of Trakl, Claude Régy pursues his exploration of the space “beyond the darkness” of humanity and he opens within us deserts of silence – vast, dark expanses that, astonishingly, dazzle us with sudden bursts of clarity.