Although they are not programmed together at this year’s edition of FIDMarseille, it’s nonetheless intriguing to encounter Christine Baudillon’s Poetique de l’eau alongside Helena Wittmann’s A Thousand Waves Away; both films are fascinated by water as a poetic device and a powerful ecological reality that dictates human life while acting as a repository for all manner of religious, superstitious belief. Poetique de l’eau , or simply Poetics of Water, flits between an experimental mode and an essayistic one, featuring voiceover narration by Baudillon herself and Jean-Christophe Bailly, reciting passages from Gaston Bachelard, Edgar Allan Poe (translated by Baudelaire), Baily’s own writings, and, for the epilogue titled “a pretty Fly,” archival footage from Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter. Clocking in at just under an hour, it’s dense enough that transcribing all of the voiceover is impossible, as is full comprehension of all the philosophical interjections that unspool at such a quick pace. But the film is very effective at creating and sustaining a mood, a kind of lulling quietude that allows viewers to fully succumb to the quiet rhythms of lapping waves and gently billowing grass.
The film begins with a shot of a dead cat in a box submerged under a pool of shallow water. The camera is facing straight down, catching the reflection of the looming sky on the surface of the water, which creates a kind of shimmering, superimposition effect. It’s sad, of course — we are not used to being confronted with a dead domesticated animal in the opening seconds of a film. But the moment becomes calming, natural even, as we register the idea of something organic returning to nature in a respectful, ritualistic manner. A flower has been arranged beside the cat inside the box, suggesting some love and care in its handling. A dedication follows, which reads “to his majesty Bebop, this cat, this joy; to all animals and otherness, flowers, trees, stones and rocks, winds, streams, rivers and seas, to the coming night.”
From here, the film proceeds as a series of largely static master shots, in which Baudillon frames the horizon line in different ways and finds naturally occurring symmetries via protruding objects and drift wood. A sizeable log is arranged parallel to the shore line in multiple shots, suggesting the bifurcated compositions of a Rothko painting. Strange-looking pieces of gnarled wood jut out of the placid surface of the sea, reaching toward the sky. There are multiple shots of waves crashing against the flat shoreline, as well as the occasional cut away to fields of tall grass swaying gently under the breeze. The widescreen images are suffused with every shade of blue, the sky occasionally blending into the surface of the water.
All of this is accompanied by voiceover commentary, a constant stream of philosophical mutterings that wash over the viewer a little too quickly. It’s difficult to process the images and the words simultaneously, meaning that one or the other is demanding attention to the detriment of the other. As an example, one long passage begins, “the language of the waters is a direct poetic reality; that streams and rivers provide the sound for mute landscapes, and do it with a strange fidelity; that murmuring waters teach birds and men to sing, speak, recount; and that there is, in short, a continuity between the speech of water and the speech of man.” The cumulative effect of all of this aural and visual information is an overriding sense that Baudillon is attempting to arrange nature into a more digestible aesthetic object, denying the unpredictable power of these elements — wind, water, mana — in favor of a more carefully curated experience, even anthropomorphizing it in some ways.
The filmmaker seems to recognize this, at least to a degree, and toward the end of the film switches from her own voice to that of Bailly, who proceeds to announce an entire taxonomy of every single kind of water, from the naturally occurring to those influenced by human intervention: “river, canal, puddle, pool, jet, reservoir, eddy, pond, lake, fountain, aqueduct…” and so on. Here, the film cuts much more rapidly, interjecting finally some signs of human activity. It’s a rousing finale, suggesting all the ways in which we encounter water every day, even when we are not consciously recognizing it as such. For all its patience, Poetique de l’eau is admittedly too fragmented to land with real authority; its philosophical underpinnings would be better served on the page rather than the screen. But it’s nonetheless an extremely pleasant object to look at, and for those able and willing to succumb to its quiet rhythms, there is much to enjoy here.
Published as part of FIDMarseille 2025 — Dispatch 2.
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