Victor Hugo, the Artist’s Eye
An odyssey which allows us to chart the seas of Hugo's vast imagination and sends us hot-foot in search of the books, the moment the programme is over.
Type (Documentaire / Documentaire fiction / Série documentaire)DocumentaryGenre en anglaisArts & culture Directed by Henry ColomerSupported by Angoa-Agicoa, Centre National du Livre, CNC, Ministère de la Culture et de la Communicaiton, Procirep, Région Franche-ComtéDistributed by ADAV, Arte France DistributionYear2002Duration52min
Few writers have created as many images as Victor Hugo in the course of their working lives – primarily through the medium of words, in his poems, his extravagant fictional sagas and the vast treasure-house of writings in which he records the details of his own and his contemporaries’ lives, the time in which he lived and his appreciations of great men such as Shakespeare.
But all through his life, Hugo also drew and painted – producing gouaches, water-colours, line drawings, caricatures, sketches and decorative drawings, and calligraphy. Everything he set his hand to is illustrated – his notebooks, his books, his manuscripts – any blank sheet of paper was an irresistible invitation.
As with the rest of his productions, he was well aware that his numerous drawings and paintings were an integral part of his artistic output. And Henry Colomer is surely amongst the directors best qualified to present this mammoth self-portrait.
Press coverage
Confronted with the enormity of the human and literary monument shaped by exile, the expertly crafted direction leads us into a profound inner meditation. (…) Supported by the grave declamation of Jacques Fornier, with a tone perfectly attuned to the emotional density, the majestic Hugoian verb [defies] both vastness and humanity. It drifts over the drawings that the camera explores with a keen sense of framing and perspective, bringing to life the haunting phantasmagoria of the details. The few virtual animations, exquisitely executed, further draw us into a realm beyond ordinary thought, an extraordinary breath.
Télérama
Henry Colomer aptly revisits nearly twenty years of exile for the author of Les Misérables (...). Depending on the places where he lived—Jersey, Guernsey—his "thought drifts back and forth..."
Le Figaro
In Victor Hugo, a documentary directed by Henry Colomer that draws from excerpts of La Légende des siècles as well as Les Travailleurs de la mer, and illustrated with Hugo's drawings and seascapes, we uncover the intimacy of the committed writer during his years of exile in Jersey and Guernsey—a period when literary fertility and political struggle went hand in hand.
Le Monde
Read by Jacques Fornier, the excerpts from Les Contemplations, La Légende des siècles, Les Misérables, and Les Travailleurs de la mer escape the constraints of academic rigidity and regain their full vigor. Remarkable animations of photos and drawings accompany them (...), making Victor Hugo a beautiful tribute to the modernity of a classic.
Les Inrockuptibles
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