Alice's Four Stories

In Les quatre récits d’Alice, Myriam Jacob-Allard explore a story which, because of its persistance, is part of the family lore. This story, told countless times by her grandmother, is an implausible tale of the time a hurricane worthy of The Wizard of Oz, when she was a child, picked her up and sent her flying. Present in each of these stories, the idea of flying away – or of sending someone flying (t’envoler) – invests the piece with a strange duality: at once murky and light-hearted, the sign of freedom and attachment, of belonging and flight, it is the duality of fear of the unknown and the reassuring familiar. Under the surface, a private story’s potential for universality can be seen taking shape, but also, as a sign of the times at this moment of great uniformity, the deep desire to reconnect with – or even to invent – a unique story all one’s own. The video Les quatre récits d’Alice, whose pictures are split into two, show images documenting tornadoes and hurricanes on one side, taken from the internet or from disaster films, and the artist reading a weather forecast against an amateurish green background on the other side. Here Jacob-Allard lip syncs a story told by her grandmother. A montage/collage of images to her left flows past to illustrate the story. The visual codes of the television weather forecast quickly become secondary to four different versions of her grandmother’s story, which Jacob-Allard recorded over a ten-year period. Over the years, the story changes. The key points remain but the sequence of events differ and, curiously, the more time that passes, the further back the story goes, with her grandmother saying she was fourteen, then thirteen, twelve and eleven years old. Les quatre récits d’Alice, in its many offshoots, becomes a kind of essay on memory, passing on and belonging. By repeating the various versions of Alice’s tale, Jacob-Allard makes the story her own. This distance speaks to the subjectivity of memory—somewhat like her grandmother distancing herself more and more from the time of her own story, modifying it along the way—as well as to the need for moorings when constructing one’s identity and for a desire to free oneself in order to evolve. In this sense, there is an analogy to be seen between Myriam Jacob-Allard’s project and certain auto-fiction practices in which, out of the merging of auto-biographical content and the search for a novelistic form, arises a story about oneself which, through its very narrative, contributes to the construction of the self and, as such, evolves towards fiction. — France Choinière

Year

2020

Director

myriam jacob-allard

Duration

5 min

Country

Canada

Language

French