The Mechanisms of Accommodation - Text 3
In a completely different vein, because there is no one “cinema” but rather “cinemas,” we must give special mention to a film by Florent-Emilio Siri, Cloclo with Jérémie Renier, which traces the tragic fate of an icon of French song in the 1970s, Claude François, who died at the age of 39.
One shot in this film is quite striking: the one in which we see the singer arrive on stage just before the curtain is raised. This shot is followed by a long lateral tracking shot following the singer as he passes in front of his musicians, back-up singers and dancers. He is not in focus; they are. They are all looking at him in admiration. His image is blurry. He is then shown facing the camera, still in soft focus. The shot ends with a rack focus, in which he finally comes into focus. To understand this somewhat peculiar play and this choice of staging, we must describe the scene which preceded this shot. A courier receives an envelope right on the tarmac of an airport from a flight attendant on the gangway of a commercial airplane. This envelope is taken to the dressing room of Claude François. It contains a 45 RPM. record. As the singer places it on a record player, we read the date on the record: 7 October 1968. The record is “My Way,” a version of “Comme d’habitude,” sung by Frank Sinatra. The blurriness described above is thus there to show, once again, a transition, one which confers the status of star on the singer and gives him an international dimension. To employ a somewhat conventional expression, we might say that we see him “in the clouds.”
