A tribute to the Corsican ethnomusicologist Michel Giacommetti. After arriving in Portugal in 1959, Giacometti spent thirty years of his life collecting and studying music, tales, stories and poetry across the country to save forgotten traditions.
“J’ai une manière de procéder quasi obsessionnelle, assez obsessive qui est de retourner sur les lieux plusieurs fois, d’essayer de ne pas adopter une manière de filmer qui appartienne à l’ordre de la surprise, de préparer un maximum mes tournages aussi bien sur les lieux, avec les gens, de les voir et de retourner les voir autant de fois qu’il est nécessaire pour que finisse par se dégager un point de vue, de mettre en place le tournage de la façon la plus juste.”
Pierre-Marie Goulet1
“I made the Giacometti film with Antoine Bonfanti, a sound engineer who had always worked with me since 1978. He was the great engineer of direct sound. Chris Marker, Godard, Marguerite Duras, André Delvaux, Resnais... Bonfanti, who was a Corsican, before arriving in Portugal heard about Giacometti, who was also a Corsican. They struck up a friendship and thanks to that we developed, the three of us, a project that was to be filmed. But Giacometti died before we could start the film. Five years later Antoine and I still wanted to make the film and we finally decided to make Polifonias, which took up Giacometti’s desire to bring together the Corsican and Alentejan cultures. I added to the film a tribute to Michel Giacometti’s own path.”
Pierre-Marie Goulet2
- 1Serge Meurant, "Conversation avec Pierre-Marie Goulet à Lisbonne, les 3 et 4 mai 2007," Images documentaires, 2007.
- 2Pierre-Marie Goulet, Courtisane.be.
