Ilse Frech

Her gaze, directed out of the frame, is that of a young woman, a passerby, as I see my gaze reflected noticing hers, as often without as with a camera, this one moment is part of uncountable momenti, forming a large body of work – an archive of several thousands of photographs; after years of working as a visual artist in documentary photography and filming, of which my years of observations have been scribbled down in notes and illustrations in a many moleskine notebooks, whilst being a Parisian and former resident in Paris, the result of which may become the basis for a fiction filmscript.

LES YEUX DES PAUVRES

XXVI

Ah! vous voulez savoir pourquoi je vous hais aujourd’hui. Il vous sera sans doute moins facile de le comprendre qu’à moi de vous l’expliquer; car vous êtes je crois, le plus bel exemple d’imperméabilité féminine qui se puisse rencontrer.

Nous avions passé ensemble une longue journée qui m’avait paru courte. Nous nous étions bien promis que toutes nos pensées nous seraient communes à l’un et à l’autre, et que nos deux âmes désormais n’en feraient plus qu’une; – un rêve qui n’a rien d’original, après tout, si ce n’est que, rêvé par tous les hommes, il n’a été réalisé par aucun.

Charles Baudelaire, extrait; Le Spleen de Paris, Poèmes en Prose (1865)

A GENTLE WOMAN

PARIS

Let’s say PARIS is a gentle woman.

You’ll relish her for her mad rebellious sense of being, forever. Indifferent she will be, whether you’ll roam her streets, wander around in her parks, have a chat with your neighbour on a terrace, watch life pass by, seeing women crying in silence at every corner, above or below surface, like some kind of mysterious encrypted message displayed for your eyes only, to decipher, whereas a taxidriver asks for your number, moments later someone runs you over being chased by the police, a reflection of light makes you see yourself, sudden, carfed out in vastness, and someone starts yelling across the street with wavering hands pointing towards the sky, perhaps warning passersby, that doomsday may finally befall upon us. Days earlier, five firemen ask you to make way for an elderly person in need of a chair to be seated – while you were just undressing in one of the fitting rooms of a grand warehouse, whence a sudden burst of laughther hits you hard to awaken, out of your daydreams. She, PARIS, just nods friendly and says, these things happen to anyone, anywhere, anytime, and that you shouldn’t take life that serious. At all.

(Journal entry, by Ilse Frech) – This series is part of a larger body of work, that may become the basis for a fiction filmscript.