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Conducting Threads is an ongoing experimental film project made on the island of Shikoku, in southern Japan. It shows aspects of daily life and work there, including fishing, indigo dyeing, and local puppet troupes rehearsing and performing the eighteenth century play Keisei Awa no Naruto [The Courtesan of Naruto].
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" In screening notes for The Last Bolshevik [Le Tombeau d’Alexandre, 1992] Chris Marker asks: “What better conducting thread [fil conducteur] than this life [Aleksandr Medvedkin] to explore the tragedy of our century?” 1
Here again the term appears, in Daniel L. Potter's analysis of Sans Soleil:
Memory, we hear early in the film, is not the obverse of forgetting but its “lining”. Memory and forgetting are trails on a singular moebius strip which frustrates or undermines their differentiation, philosophic and cinematic. Marker translates this membrane, this lining, into one of the fils conducteurs (conducting threads) of Sans Soleil; It is not left intact, but found to be violated. 2
In this use of the term, fil conducteur has a technical meaning (‘conductive wire’) which overlays its abstract meaning (‘guiding thread’) to create a third meaning - 'energetic linkages'. These are either forged or made visible through the multilayered, woven texture of film - between images, bodies, subjectivities, histories, and different forms of knowledge, between sound and image, through visual 'leitmotif'.
Conducting threads are everywhere in my film, in a literal sense - in the guise of fishing line, nautical rope, dyed and woven threads, but most importantly through 'karakuri', the string-led mechanism that translates between the bodies of puppet and puppeteer, and animates the painted scenery panels of 'karakuri fusuma', as these open into an illusory space within the puppet stage, connecting the space of the real with the realm of the unreal. "
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1 “Peut-on rêver de meilleur fil conducteur que cette vie pour explorer la tragédie de notre siècle?” https://www.bateauivre.coop/évènements/chrismarker/
2 Daniel L. Potter, Wounded Time, Notes on Sans Soleil https://medium.com/@llull/wounded-time-on-sans-soleil-bbb59990c6b5