Find out more about writer Maylis Kerangal (Wiki article in French) / (book review in English).
A bolt of lightning tears through a stormy sky. Its rumbling shakes the night, and its luminous feelers touch down on the earthly landscape. The bolt, the opening image of Manuela Morgaine’s Lightning, is the film’s raw material, its metonymy: it’s what gives it form, shapes its chronology, defines its cinematography. It is what makes this film the occurrence of lightning itself: an experience, a rift.
A narrative saga, an intelligible flash
This is a cinematic saga in the form of a lightning flash. And its power undoubtedly derives from just such a feat: fashioning a bolt out of a saga. Or how a long narrative that unfolds over nearly four hours — Baal, autumn; Pathos Mathos, winter: The Legend of Symeon, spring; Atoms, summer — captures the intensity of the electrical charge, the blinding aftereffect, the hallucinatory pulsing, and the sound of thunder. Or how a filmmaker, seeking lightning out in all its forms, goes looking for its multiple esthetic and cognitive dimensions – chemistry / alchemy, anthropology, archeology, biology – in order to trace the movement of an incandescent film whose image lingers on the retina.
Filming lightning, filming Lightning, mad film.
Manuela Morgaine’s cinematic adventure borrows its form from the lightning’s zigzag: its segments and offshoots trace a geographic trajectory branching out across several countries (France, Guinea-Bissau, Tunisia, Libya, Syria), penetrating secret or forbidden territories, stretching out along seas and rivers, on a deserted beach where anything can happen. Lines that define a movement where time comes undone and redone: drawing on myth (Baal), the immediacy of eyewitness accounts (Pathos Mathos), the legendary, and the chaos of history (the Legend of Symeon), and on the enduring literary romantic encounter (Atoms), Manuela Morgaine films and assembles the shards of a diffracted temporality where dreams and magic form an alliance.
But beyond its many imprints, from its first manifestation — the bolt of lightning — to its last image — the shamanic trance of Azor who learns and embodies the erratic movements of lightning — Manuela Morgaine’s quest confronts us with a form of movement and empathy. For the ambition of Lightning is to find a straight line in the zigzag. To give a linearity back to these lives that were struck and stricken by lighting (melancholic patients, lovers, survivors), to uncover a frequency of narrative and memory in these scattered fragments. This line, which is that of the film stock, the frame, is here the sensory experience of the rift. Filming lightning, Manuela Morgaine creates that rift in the magical night of the darkened theater, and in our hearts.