A Picture of Us

Overview

In 2010 with the full-length film X+, Marylène Negro takes up a new dimension of human experience : the collectivity. "A Picture of Us". What are the aggregating forces that bring forth this drive - brusque or slow, woven from facts, simplifications and resonances that we can call, always approximately, collective history ? The cinema relentlessly records silhouettes, groups, crowds, masses - fleeting passers-by of a period they are going through, tiny extras of a zeitgeist that carries them along. X+ explores the visual and sound forms of presence thanks to which persist or dissolve the argentic traces of these innumerable figures whose existence forms the tissue of humanity and whose mingled gestures - noticed or unnoticed, make up the supposed "collective" substratum of collective history. X+ attains the very principle of figurativity. (Nicole Brenez)