Christophe
The mystery guest

PostED ON OCTOBER 11, 2016 AT 11AM

© Institut Lumière / Photo Léa Rener

It takes place in in one of those of multi-purpose spaces going straight toward the third millennium: Half shopping center /half cultural center. Well, let's just keep it together and say that there is also a cinema complex, which is incidentally, beautiful. And who should come tumbling down, just before 8pm, as the surprise guest of the Télérama cinema club? Even for a surprise it's a surprise; although…

Suddenly, the viscontien runt with the eagle profile and smoky glasses arrives. As usual, he only comes out at night, like the guardian of the temple, verifying his treasures. One day, Fellini was in Paris and wanted to organize a screening of "La Strada" in the orginal Italian, with French subtitles. Henri Langlois declared that the only copy available in the capital was in the hands of Daniel Bevilacqua, AKA Christophe. CHRISTOPHE? You mean to say the chick-magnet, singer of hit ballad "Aline" and "Les Marionettes" is a cinephile? Yes, and not just a little! He's even a guy who, at the time, also played the "dragon watching over his treasures" with his butt parked on dozens of boxes of Super-8, 16 and 35 millimeter reels. He would often organize screenings at home for friends, cherishing in irretrievable fetishist fashion, the strip of celluloid between his gloved fingers...

That's what he said tonight on the stage of the UGC Ciné-Cité Confluence, sitting cross-legged on a red chair. We also learn that during the intermissions of CINEVOG in Juvisy-sur-Orge he began his blues-singing career. At age fourteen. Then in a confidential tone and in "Patrick Mondian" mode, begins making controlled ellipses and gaps in syntax that remain suspended; he changes radically the subject and takes the conversation in a hundred directions, with swaggering anecdotes. He finally proposes three excerpts from documentaries, as unique and poetic as himself... Lunar leprechaun, melody diffracter, sound provider, cut-up prank initiator. The Parnassian "rital" extraordinaire chose to screen this evening a movie that could describe his nights, Cape Fear by Jacky Thomson, 1962, with Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck.

Christophe, so small and yet so big. LARGER THAN LIFE! Respect.

Pierre Collier