 |
The Cliffs by Bertrand Fleuret.
Published by J&L Books.
|
The Cliffs by
Bertrand Fleuret published by J&L books starts on the cover. The clear
plastic dust jacket wraps around the plain grey boards both protecting the book
and creating a veil through which we read the five or so paragraphs of text
that call out to be read before the book is even opened. It's not exactly a
thesis, but more or less serves as one, narrating the dream of Fleuret's that inspired the book.
So The Cliffs is a book about a dream, which is
simultaneously a fascinating and infuriating subject. As vivid as dream
memories can be, they often slip away when the memory tires to seize them and
the attempt to communicate the imagery, narrative or feeling of a dream can
be endlessly frustrating. The effervescent nature of those memories seem to exist
in a language that is akin to our spoken words, but is ultimately something
else altogether. We grope to explain to the listener the miraculous and intangible nature of that dream, while the listener in turn gropes to understand,
find a common ground and a way to complete the visualization of what is being
described with their own internal visual language. There's a reason why some
people never talk about their dreams -- the process can be so frustrating that
it is ultimately very boring to the listener. But this book isn't so much about
the actual dream as it is an experiment in how to communicate it.
 |
| The Cliffs by Bertrand Fleuret. Published by J&L Books. |
 |
| The Cliffs by Bertrand Fleuret. Published by J&L Books. |
By introducing the narrative on the cover, the reader has
already been made familiar with the story. Now resting in memory, the black
pages of the small book begin to walk the reader through an illustrated version
of the story. The images themselves are attributed in the back of the book -- a
good many of them were rephotographed from
National Geographic, causing a
fuzziness that works well with the intended descriptive qualities of the
narrative. Though all the images appear small and snap-shot-like, there is a
strong filmic quality, but it is not cinematic -- filmic like
La Jetee in its
still images and blackness, lulling and narrative but also static. Small
segments of white text appear like poetry on the black pages walking the reader
through the dream and serving as subtitles to the photographs. The images within
the book seem to modify each other as they go along -- none of them are assumed
to be literal visualizations of the dream, but rather approximations, something
close to what Fleuret saw, and thus as they pass, the conceptual image is
augmented by the variations in the following photographs.
 |
| The Cliffs by Fleuret Bertrand. Published by J&L Books. |
 |
| The Cliffs by Bertrand Fleuret. Published by J&L Books. |
In the end, has the reader achieved a closer or more
accurate understanding of Fleuret's dream? It's impossible to say, but this
mode of communication at least makes the dream more visceral for me. We experience it
three times -- once on the cover, again with the small descriptive texts
illustrated with the images and we are then acquainted once again through
reproductions of Fleuret's journal. By the time I reached his drawings they were more evocative for me than
the photographs and closer to my mental image. I felt like I knew the dream.
The Cliffs is among the best examples of how text
and image can merge to communicate beyond the powers of each individually. -- Sarah Bradley
purchase book
