Du journal de deuil à l’œuvre de sépulture : « Lo » (Thanassis Vassiliou, 2021-2025)

Abstract

After his mother’s death in 2017, Thanassis Vassiliou returned to Greece and began filming. The instinctive act of recording aimed both to come to terms with the now definitive absence in places still filled with memories, and to document his own reactions, attempting to preserve them even if he could not fully understand them. These filmic notes could perhaps, later on, allow another perspective, according to the dynamic that Antoine Compagnon aptly analyzed as paradoxical in relation to Barthes’s Mourning Diary: “mourning and narrative are antinomic, but [...] only narrative [...] is capable of expressing the experience of mourning, the paradox being resolved if we take into account the double meaning of the word mourning, as the perpetuation of a state of grief, immutable and undialectical, and as an active process of emerging from this state.” Beyond the reflex to capture images with the near-instantaneous speed afforded by smartphones, the difficulty of finding the appropriate form to give to these fragments arose with even greater urgency, as it involved both the processes of film creation and navigating grief. By tracing the genesis of the film Lo, this article aims to analyze the interactions between, on the one hand, a creative process which, stemming from a filial anxiety rekindled by the mother’s death, required a co-writer to successfully configure the initial film diary, and, on the other hand, the transition from a journal of mourning to what Pierre Fédida called “the work of sepulchre,” that is, “this preparation, after death, of the place that will make communication between the living and the dead possible.”