Paul Meyer (scenario writer)

The adventure of Déjà flies away the thin flower

The Belgian minister for the State education then charges Paul Meyer with making a film (with intention of propaganda), on the adaptation to the country of the children of the immigrant workers. The work of location is made difficult in the Borinage (selected for film) in full strike. Meyer does not know yet the film Misère with Coal-mining of Henri Storck, but it engages the cameraman François Rents with whom one owe part of the images of film of Stork and Joris Ivens. It ends up convincing of the children of immigrants to play in the film whose intention meanwhile radically changed. The original budget being exhausted, it finds on the spot a backer unexpected, Emile Cavenaille, director of brewery, Communist and impassioned Walloon separatist.

The original diversion

It then transforms the order which was made to him. It makes play first concerned - immigrants with Coal-mining - their own part. It has direction of the direction of the actors with regard to the children, the scene where those descend the Terrils on kinds of made sledges of a board out of wooden is famous. Its film becomes a wire of feature-length film of fiction. And of propaganda film, it becomes a film which denounces the way in which the immigrants can sometimes be treated in these Walloon mines where do not want to descend the autochtones any more. Déjà flies away the thin flower is sent to the festival of Porretta Terme in Italy where it gains the Price of Criticism. The international press, Flemish or Walloon is eulogistic. The film also gains the Grand Prix of Excellence to the National Festival of Belgian Film of Antwerp, which is worth to him to be mentioned in the Encyclopedia Dutchwoman Winkler Prins (Amsterdam 1961). In 1963 it is selected with the Cannes festival for the international week of Criticism and already praised by the Cahiers of the Cinema . But since 1960, Paul Meyer is badgered by the ushers. Paul-Henri Spaak prevents that the film is seen with the festival of Moscow and Paul Meyer will be accused of misuse of public money and will be condemned to refund them all his life.

Continuation of a difficult career of scenario writer, realizer TV, man of theater

It does it in particular while working for television in Wallonia and in Brussels. It turns a medium-length film of fiction the nerve of peace in 1961, another film on the area of Scheldeland in 1964, puts in scene a play I am your foreigner for the advisory counsel from abroad of Flémalle in 1969. It returns to the cinema with a short film for RTBF-Liege Time in 1972. After a short passage as professor with the IAD (Institute of arts of diffusion), it carries out That goes Parnajon? in 1975, then in 1977 the grass under the feet . He will work with Pierre Manuel, Henri Mordant… Again meeting the censure, unemployment, in spite of the support of colleagues like precisely Corrosive Henri.

The judgment of Henri Storck on Déjà flies away…

In 1989 Henri Storck judges Déjà thus flies away the thin flower : " With its strange great outdoors, the film of Meyer is one of more “the buñuel iens” that I know. As vigorously as the style of the Spanish Master, it is all impregnated a tragic feeling of the life, to which is added, at Meyer, an irremediable disenchantment (...) You will see in his film how one retracts the anecdote, how of a picturesque and episodical character one reaches the type, how from the private individual one passes to the general, and of concrete the abstract. How one manages to make cinema without literature, theater, borrowing from any kind, how one writes in a language refined, purely visual and sound, able to be tasted by all and in all the countries (...) If it is marked by a deep sadness, a quivering pity, a sometimes corrosive bitterness, his work turns neither to the lampoon nor to the aigreur." ( Déjà flies away the thin flower by Henri Storck in Cinéma Wallonia Brussels, Of Documentary social with film of fiction )

And on Coal-mining

Storck still writes: " To reveal the heart of Coal-mining, it put on page of the landscapes at the immense panoramas of an extraordinary quality of light. Meyer is our modern Patenier.

Paul Meyer founder of the Walloon cinema

Is this man the man of only one film? In any case, he is often considered, and by the best critics, like the true initiator of the Walloon cinema. He poses the founding document of the Histoire of the Walloon cinema. And Patrick Leboutte is very eulogistic in his connection: the film of Paul Meyer, Déjà flies away the thin flower , is being the first Walloon film. It in the Walloon cinema, such as I defined it there, a filiation whose Meyer is the father (see its interview).

It appears among the signatories of the Manifeste for the Walloon culture of 1983.

The extraordinary reception of the Parisian press in 1994

Déjà flies away the thin flower will be presented to Paris in 1994 when the reception of the press is extraordinary. But it occurs 35 years after the exit of film! Release written: " If the cinema were not able to transform a heap of mining waste into Olympe, one wonders what it would be useful (...). The film of Paul Meyer takes without blow to férir a place of very first row of the history of the European cinema of the post-war period. Nugget neorealist, prefiguration New wave, radical documentary object, meteor of the néo-social Utopias and venture experimental Déjà flies away the thin flower is with the confluences of sprécipytes of sound époque" (Olivier Séguret). Le Monde does not hesitate to place it at the sides of Rossellini, Visconti (Pascal Mérigeau) and Télérama of Ken Loach.

A new comment of the Books of the Cinema

At the end of film, the old Italian workman Domenico traverses glance the Coal-mining top of a Terril (monticule of broken coal, element characteristic of spays mining of formerly, elsewhere in Wallonia or in the North of France for example), the camera top of this spoil heap " discover a world in the process of disappearance, sign of pain, exploitation, deaths absorbed by the mine, but also the world where will live the new ones arrived. Déjà flies away the thin flower is with the image of these landscapes and these spoil heaps, an idea made concrete, that of time, life unceasingly reappearing. On this ground which one tore off all possible energy, the grasses, the bushes, the trees push back, vivifying it again… "

The poem which gives its name to film

Gia stole Li fiore magre

Non sapro nulla beyond mia vita

oscuro monotono sangue.

Not sapro chi amavo, chi amo,

will ora che which stretto, ridotto ale crumb

will membra

nel guasto vento di marzo

enumero I Mali dei giorni decifrati/Già stole Li fiore magro

dai rami. E io attendo

pazienza LED suo volo irrevovcabile.

(Salvatore Low Sunday)

will not know anything of my life :: obscure and monotonous blood.

I will not know anything, which I liked, who I like

now that folded up, reduced to my

members,

in the rotted wind March

I enumerate the evils of the deciphered days.

Of the branches already flies away the thin felur

And me I await

the patience of his irrevocable flight.]

The engagement of Paul Meyer

Paul Meyer will continue a difficult existence then, under the weight of this debt which he will have to refund all his life. He signs the Manifeste for the Walloon culture in 1983 and his counterpart of 2003. Originating in the German-speaking cantons, by its talent and its courage, it is undoubtedly that which carried the Walloon cinema on the baptismal font of the revolt and the denunciation.

Paul Meyer can seem the man of only one film. We announced all the others already. He had like project to carry out the memory with the larks , a scenario Co-writing with his partner Anne Michotte, where was put in scene Toni Santocono, wire of Italian immigrant, alive in Wallonia and which wrote a novel which met an immense success, Rue of the Italians like Nino Seviroli, librarian with Aragona, in Sicily, which worked as professor and organizer in Wallonia during about fifteen years before turning over in its country of origin.

The idea of film is that the investigations of Santocono will carry out it in Wallonia, in Brussels in Switzerland and Italy with Seviroli. On the way of their search and their wandering, they will meet witnesses or survivors of the drama of known Marcinelle under the name of Catastrophe of the Wood of Cazier which made 274 dead in 1956 of which a majority of Italian workers. And which remains most important catastophe mining of Wallonia, in the twilight of this extractive activity in the industrial furrow. Through this project, Paul Meyer, joins again thus with his inspiration of always at the sides of a man as Santocono which with him only symbolizes in the area of the Center and Louvière, a certain report/ratio of the immigrant to his land of welcome (of good or bad reception), and to the country of the origins. It was about a project of work on the memory turned to two thirds, but that annoying questions of production stopped during several years, until the death of the scenario writer.

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