To all my filmmaker friends out there. The most absolutely intriguing exhibition at Arles this year had to be, for me, the Marseilles to Rio, 1941. If there was ever a story. Talk about blind spots in history.
André Breton, Jacqueline Lamba, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Victor Serge, Wifredo Lam, and Anna Seghers are among Capitaine-Paul-Lemerle’s passengers. Their 1941 crossing from Marseille to Fort-de-France is reimagined by Adrien Bosc in his novel Capitaine.
In this exhibition, we also meet great German photographer Germaine Krull on board, sailing to the Americas, and young filmmaker, future screenwriter Rémy Assayas, also known as Jacques Rémy. (Germaine Krull was Walter Benjamin's photographer for his arcade project!)
At the end of the book, Bosc meets Rémy’s son, the brilliant film director Olivier Assayas, who shows him an album of photos taken by Krull along this journey. The photos bring the novelist’s story vividly to life. They were found loose in a drawer of the family’s country home, and Assayas identified and organized them.
A Voyage, Marseille-Rio 1941 brings all these photographs together, most of which are previously unpublished, and exhibits them in the context of the novel based on the true story of these two travelers.
Exhibition curators: Adrien Bosc and Olivier Assayas.
Publication: Un voyage : Marseille-Rio 1941, texts and photographs by Germaine Krull and Jacques Rémy, edited by Olivier Assayas and Adrien Bosc, Éditions Stock, 2019. Not yet translated into English.