If each time I had milked a cow somebody had given me a penny, I’d be a rich woman today.
An old Savoyarde peasant woman
We want to describe the indescribable: nature’s instantaneous text. We have lost the art of describing the only reality whose structure lends itself to poetic representation: impulses, aims, oscillations.
Osip E. Mandelstam, Entretiens sur Dante
We are far from wanting to mystify. Yet it is impossible for us to give a verbal key or storyline to this sequence of photographs. To do so would be to impose a single verbal meaning upon appearances and thus to inhibit or deny their own language. In themselves appearances are ambiguous, with multiple meanings. This is why the visual is astonishing and why memory, based upon the visual, is freer than reason.
There is no single ‘correct’ interpretation of this sequence of images. It attempts to follow an old woman’s reflections on her life. If she were suddenly asked: What are you thinking about? she would invent a simple answer, because the question, when taken seriously, becomes unanswerable. Her reflections cannot be defined by any answer to a question beginning with What? And yet she was thinking, reflecting, remembering, recalling, and doing so in a consecutive manner. She was making sense of herself to herself.
The ambiguities encountered are not an obstacle to ‘understanding’ this work but a condition for following it, as it attempts to follow, for a few minutes, the mind of an old woman considering her life.
The old woman, like the protagonist of a story, has been invented. Certain facts about her life can be given. She is a peasant woman. She was born in the Alps. She is unmarried and lives by herself. She has lived through two world wars. At a certain moment she went to look for work in the capital, and worked there for a number of years as a domestic servant. Later she returned to her village. She is still active and independent, working most of the day – if there is no snow – outside. In the evening, after she has eaten her soup, she knits. Sometimes she does so while watching television. Sometimes she prefers silence.
By considering her own life, she reflects, like everyone who grows old, on life in general: on being born, on childhood, on work, love, emigration, work, being a woman, death, the village, work, pleasure, solitude, men and women, work, the mountains.
The photographs of this sequence are not intended to be documentary. That is to say, they do not document the woman’s life – not even her subjective life. There are photographs included of moments and scenes which she could never have witnessed. For example, in the long sequence concerning the impact of the metropolis on an emigrant born in a village, we have used not only images of Paris but also images of Istanbul. All photographs use the language of appearances. We have tried here to speak this language so as not only to illustrate, but also to articulate a lived experience.
