Film #6
e-flux and the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen are pleased to present the sixth film in the joint series From My Window / From Your Window, this time a feature film—Claude Faraldo’s cult satire Themroc (1973).
Claude Faraldo, Themroc, 1973
France, 100 minutes
Faraldo’s subversive satire lacks any intelligible dialogue or music, with a screenplay composed entirely of gestures, grunts, gibberish, moans, and screams. Themroc, a factory worker played by the late Michel Piccoli, goes about his daily existence between his job and the apartment he shares with his mother and sister, until an incident at work pushes him over the edge, causing him to regress to primitive behavior and tear down the wall of his living room—virtually transforming his home into a cave, open to the public.
Claude Faraldo (1936–2008) was a French actor, screenwriter, and film director. In addition to Themroc (1973) which he is best known for, Faraldo has written and directed about a dozen disparate and original films, among them Deux lions au soleil (1980) and The Widow of Saint-Pierre (2000).
About the series
Organized by e-flux and the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, this joint screening series is inspired by a film by Józef Robakowski titled Z mojego okna (From My Window), made in Łodż, Poland over a 20-year period from 1978 to 1999, as part of a project that Robakowski called My Very Own Cinema: “what I work on when nothing is working out.”
The series has presented a short film every week or two—all of them freely available online—starting with Robakowski’s film and following since with Marguerite Duras’ Les mains négatives (Negative Hands), John Smith’s Dirty Pictures, Chantal Akerman’s La chambre, and Herz Frank’s Ten Minutes Older, and now ending with the feature film Themroc by Claude Faraldo. Alongside the films, we have asked artists and filmmakers to contribute a brief video-letter or video statement to this project: a small window into their current situation, and into how they are living through this moment. It is our hope that this collective record of the present will help us imagine a future that we want to live in. Responses have so far featured Emily Jacir’s 24 marzo (dalla mia finestra) (From My Window), Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s A Letter to Marguerite, Nicolas Wackerbarth’s Vier Wände (Four Walls), and Coco Fusco’s The Woman by the Window, with the sixth and last response in the series to be released in the coming days—stay tuned!
The International Short Film Festival Oberhausen is the oldest and most prestigious festival of its kind, founded in 1954.
e-flux is an online publishing platform and think tank, founded in 1999.
For more information contact program [at] e-flux.com.
