ÉDITIONS MATIÈRE

It was in Baby Boom that I feel, for the first time, melancholy welling up in his work [+]

Baby Boom and the “Comics of Attraction”. […] It was in Baby Boom that I feel, for the first time, melancholy welling up in his work, precisely at the points where a fully “cinematic” or “encyclopedic” manga would “breakdown,” for example, in the representation of continuous movement, or a complete archive of things‑to‑do. I first felt this in what is probably one of the otherwise least memorable of episodes in Baby Boom, titled “Vending Machine” [“Distributeur automatique” in the French version]. The father and son walk up to a vending machine, insert money, push a button, receive their canned soft drink, share it, finish it off, and dispose of it in a recycling container. The sentimentality stems in part from the preciousness of parent and child sharing everyday life. But there is also something about this episode, and other ones as well, that reminds me of the early motion pictures of the Lumière brothers, where what was on display was often something very banal, of mild or no interest if seen in real life (workers exiting the factory, a boat leaving harbor, a train arriving into station), together forming a catalogue of everyday activities and non‑events, the sole attraction of which was there presentation as cinematic events. This was, to use a popular term from film studies, “a cinema of attractions” versus a later cinema that depended on plot and charismatic characters to enthrall audiences. […] [version intégrale à lire sur le blog] [-]