Why I chose Nescafe?
by Fabrice Reymond
“Nescafe was at first the title that I had in mind for a newspaper that would be published for one day only. It then became the title of my diary, before becoming the title of a film project. The latter began as a working method. As the film script was invented by an accountant of the Mafia and the entire production system (location, filming, editing, mixing, and distribution) was invented by his grandchildren, I produced, thanks to Eliot Ness (Sony and Macintosh), a tool that would allow me to work outside these formats. This tool — or film for making films — is a database in which the various elements of cinema (sound, text, image) are desynchronized, and then played randomly by an editing program. All that remained was to multiply the data, and the spectator would do the mixing and produce the associations of meaning.
The tool finally took on the title CinémaGénérique and my body of work and my films (as one can never see the same film twice) took on the title Nescafé. The comparison of film with the brand name Nescafe is without irony or distance, but rather an association of ideas. Firstly, dehydrated products are in my mind models for poetry. Not unlike a mantra or an active solution, the poem only exists in the body and water that receives it. Art is like a contraction — a concentration —which awaits its dilution.
Moreover, what motivated my interest in working with cinema was to appropriate its spectacular and ephemeral aspects— the intensity and irreversibility of its duration. As such, the majority of the textual sequences of the film give immediate emotions, to be consumed instantly, like the ephemeral images or sounds that are captured directly in the street, on television or the radio: instant fictions.
There was also instant soup, but I thought coffee was more appropriate. I didn’t conceive of what this drink could evoke imaginatively. I would only wish to add that the majority of the film’s textual sequences were written under its influence.
World culture and hawthorn flowers, these are the reasons I chose Nescafe.”
F.R.
Translation Dean Inkster
