From the man revered as \'the artist-alchemist of celluloid\', this is an amazing marriage of sound and image. The characters, stuck in an infernal eternity take a staircase that leads to a final luminous irradiation.

From the man revered as 'the artist-alchemist of celluloid', this is an amazing marriage of sound and image. The characters, stuck in an infernal eternity take a staircase that leads to a final luminous irradiation.

35mm, color 70' Music by Michèle Bokanowski with Maurice Baquet, Jean-Marie Bon, Martine Couture, Jacques Faure, Mario Gonzalès, René Patrignani, Rita Renoir Selected by Critic's Week, 1982 Cannes Film Festival Grand Jury Prize and Prix de la SACEM, Besanon 1st Prize for experimental film at the Grenoble Film Festival.
 
...this unclassifiable artist-alchemist of celluloid, author of the most fantastic visions in French cinema." - Vincent Ostria, Cahiers du cinéma

"The music by Michèle Bokanowski escapes all the usual rhetorics of film music, and represents one of the most astonishing adventures in conjugating sound and picture." - Michel Chion L'ANGE (1977-1982)

"In this Brueghel or Bosch cloaked in a 19th century tail coat, characters "à la Boltanski," infinitely coupled to their either seemingly trivial or simply absurd chores, at once mobile (in grinding jerks) and frozen in a sort of infernal eternity, meet in various parts of an unidentifiable location, on and around, it seems, an immense expressionist staircase which leads, nevertheless, to a final luminous irradiation. This film, programmed non-stop in a Tokyo cinema for nearly ten years (as was Cocteau's "Blood of a Poet" in New York in the 50's), has reached cult status among amateurs of a most deeply disrupting and bewitching cinema." -Dominique Noguez