Entre imaginaire et enfance : rêveries filmiques d’Alain Mazars sur la Chine

Unfairly neglected (in part due to uneasy access to the films), Alain Mazars’ oeuvre is both richly diverse and highly coherent. It oftentimes foregrounds China, a country that the filmmaker discovered first hand at the end of the Cultural Revolution. In 1994 he traveled to the Hangzhou area to shoot Ma Soeur chinoise , a feature fiction film set in the post-Mao period, with Alain Bashung cast against type in the lead role. It doubly features the Middle Kingdom as socio-political reality and fantastical (or phantasmatic) imaginary while staying clear of the habitual pitfalls of exoticism, estheticism or (Extreme-)Orientalist essentialism. Within this context the specific function and role assumed by the Chinese world in Ma Soeur chinoise (as well as in such earlier films by Mazars as Au-delà du souvenir and Le Pavillon aux pivoines ) need to be scrutinized closely. It will appear that what is at stake consists not only in a blend of realism, oneirism and revelation (in an equally epiphanic and photographic sense) but, even more importantly, in a deep-seated connection to a childhood imaginary. The protagonist of Ma Soeur chinoise will thus not stop at becoming “sinicized,” “taoicized” or feminized in spiritual, operatic or, more prosaically, sartorial terms: he will eventually regress into a childlike state.