A documentary cycle involving the Rarámuri or Tarahumara people of Northern Mexico. This film addresses rites of winter as well as peyote and bakaka rites. Its commentary, read by Raymonde Carasco and Jean Rouch, is drawn from texts by Antonin Artaud.
To attain knowledge, man and woman had to be willing to give up their innocence," says Boris Lehman. Life Lesson is a poetic and philosophic reflection on the theme of paradise lost. Some fifty persons illustrate the planet's convulsions and the world's vacillations. Trying to communicate, to commune with the invisible, they cry out, sing out, give out messages, each in their own way, in their own state of solitude. These are like multiple echoes that resemble waves in the water or stars in the sky. " Behind these images and sounds that have been stifled by today's society, Lehman hunts for noises, cries, songs, messages that go astray. He says that if we look at the invisible we may hear the words. He invites us to look beyond the appearances of social life and to vibrate in tune with life's polyphony that is all around us."
The veneer of the story is a tale of chance love: two French expatriates strike up a chance romance when they meet on a ship headed back to South America.
Director, author, and professor of philosophy and film studies Raymonde Carasco (1939-2009) left behind a remarkable body of work that remains little known today. Her attempts at combining film and anthropology, which she eventually gave up, arose from an interest in Sergei Eisenstein, about whose approach to editing she had written a dissertation under the guidance of Roland Barthes. Inspired by Antonin Artaud’s book Voyage to the Land of the Tarahumara (1947, published in English in 1976 as The Peyote Dance), she traveled to Mexico, where she spent more than years with this group of Native Americans. Together with her husband, the cinematographer and film editor Régis Hebraud, she filmed an entire series of ethnographic films: Tarahumaras 78 (1979), Tarahumaras 79 – Tutuguri (1980), Los Pintos (1982), Tarahumaras 85 – Los Pascoleros (1996), Artaud et les Tarahumaras (1996), Ciguri 98 – The Peyote Dance (1998), Ciguri 99 – Le dernier Chaman (1999) and La Fêlure du temps (2004)
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