Bibliothèque nationale de France

A documentary about the French photographer Nadar aka Gaspard-Félix Tournachon

The National Library of France is the guardian of priceless treasures that tell our history, our illustrious thinkers, writers, scholars and artists. Telling the story of the exceptional treasures of the National Library of France is like opening a great history book rich in many twists and turns. Without the love of the kings of France for books and precious objects, this institution would never have seen the light of day. The story begins in the 14th century under the reign of a passionate writer, Charles V, who set up a library in his apartments in the Louvre. But it was not until the 17th century, and the reign of Louis XIV, a lover of the arts and letters, that the royal library took over its historic quarters in the rue Vivienne in Paris, which it still occupies.

Correspondences are fragments of life seized in the flesh of the great History. The one between Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau explores forty-eight years of a complex and tormented artistic friendship. Through their letters, the film unfolds the story of a talent and a genius, a unique story that sweeps across the artistic and political spectrum of fifty years of the twentieth century: cubism, Russian ballets, Guernica, the Occupation and the purge, Dora Maar, Jean Marais, Cocteau's film poetry, Picasso's ceramics and the Mediterranean sky.

Inspired by the last essay Charles Darwin wrote on the action of worms, Anna Marziano crafted a film where the cultural and political action is placed in continuity with the work of earthworms, digesting and feeding the soil microscopically day after day. The film intertwines direct observation, video projections and the decay of some film negatives buried in the ground in the attempt to keep visual traces of the life of micro-organisms.