Portraits of the Latent Space: Baudelaire & Meryon
This is a scene from a film I have always dreamed of making. Imagining the meeting of one of greatest poets, Charles Baudelaire, with one of the 19th century’s greatest engravers, Charles Meryon.
I know this meeting took place somewhere in Paris, in a café near Saint-Lazare around 1860. I even went to see if the place still existed, but everything had vanished.
Only a few written traces remained to reconstruct this encounter — and the power of imagination.
Much like Peter Watkins' film La Commune de Paris, which through its innovative narrative device was able to revisit a forgotten chapter of history within our present, the latent space offers a formidable tool for the actualization of memories.
It is an as yet unknown continent that must be explored, in order to trace its contours and, perhaps at last, complete the stories that History and time had engulfed.
