Short of the Week: A cinematic tribute to Lucien Hervé
Lucien Hervé is remembered as one of the leading pioneers of photography of the 20th century. Through his work, Hervé brought about a radical shift in architectural photography by urging the viewers to confront isolated parts and fragmented visions of modernity.
For this edition of Short of the Week, we have chosen Marcell Iványi’s incredible cinematic tribute to the photography of Lucien Hervé. Titled Wind, the 1996 short film is an artistic expansion upon Hervé’s photograph ‘Les trois femme’, which depicts three female spectators in the countryside.
According to Iványi, Wind was actually supposed to be a college assignment for a course he attended at the Hungarian Academy of Drama and film, which Yvette Biró taught. The assignment consisted of writing a short film based on Hervé’s photograph, and Iványi managed to create an outstanding exploration of the photograph’s subtext.
While talking about Biró, Iványi said: “She has this charismatic energy that comes out of her and is really an amazing person. She creates an ideal situation for writing. One day, she came up with this photo by Lucien Herve, ‘Les trois femmes’, and in the picture, you just see three women standing in the countryside, watching something outside the picture, and you don’t know what they’re watching, and you don’t know what the situation is.”
The director added: “But you under- stand that it’s a countryside and that it’s at least 30 years ago. I spent three hours on it, and the whole idea (for the screenplay) just came: that I have to be very slow, that I have to use one camera movement. And I have to show something tragic happening in the midst of this peaceful situation with the three women. That’s how I wrote the screenplay for the short. And she liked it a lot.”
The six-minute short expands on the dark suggestions in Hervé’s original work of art. As the camera pans 360 degrees in one slow take, we witness the bleak world that those three women inhabit – a desolate landscape haunted by death and destruction. Iványi ended up winning the coveted Palme d’Or for Best Short Film at Cannes that year.
Watch the film below.
