Thierry Thomas

The title 'The desire to be useless' recalls a famous Hugo Pratt's expression and contains a double meaning. On one hand, it representes the comic's claim as an art form, long considered marginal but elevated, but by Pratt was considered a language with high literary and artistic value. On the other, it expresses a life philosophy founded on freedom, on the rejection of reducing existence to fiction or to commodity, and on the possibility of the adventure and the unexpected. Containing interviews with Patrizia Zanotti, Dominique Petitfaux, Thierry Thomas e Marco Steiner, the documentary completes a cinematic research lasted twenty years, returning Hugo Pratt as one of the most important auhor of illustrated literature and an artist still capable of being received by the contemporary audience.

Most of the time, Roland Barthes is classified in the category of the 1970s intellectuals, where all his fascinating singularity fades. Our movie holds exactly to the desire of making perceptible his singularity. In this purpose, the movie is constituted by an editing of archives, articulated around Barthes presence and the progress of his career. It is thus a kind of a Roland Barthes’s cinematic version by Roland Barthes, a self–portrait that could be resumed by a point of view as accurate as possible.

Most of the time, Roland Barthes is classified in the category of the 1970s intellectuals, where all his fascinating singularity fades. Our movie holds exactly to the desire of making perceptible his singularity. In this purpose, the movie is constituted by an editing of archives, articulated around Barthes presence and the progress of his career. It is thus a kind of a Roland Barthes’s cinematic version by Roland Barthes, a self–portrait that could be resumed by a point of view as accurate as possible.

At the end of 1918 while civil war is raging on in Russia, antagonism is slowly spreading to the East, between the Oral mountains and Shanghai. Stuck between a desire to save what's left of the great Imperial Russia, and starting from a clean slate, old generals, secret organizations, and mercenaries attracted by gold, struggle to take advantage of the events. As Corto Maltese returns to Shanghai, he barely gets time to cross paths with his old friend/nemesis Rasputin, and escape a murder attempt before being contacted by members of a Chinese secret organization called "The Red Lanterns". In the heart of violent Manchurian horizons, Corto and Rasputin launch themselves into a fabulous treasure hunt, following the tracks of the mysterious armor-plated train of Kolchak. A steel monster spiked with canons and machine guns, this trains protects the counter-revolutionaries gold...

Several key words emerge from Hugo Pratt's work, inseparable from his life: travel, adventure, erudition, esotericism, mystery, poetry, melancholy... and of course, Corto Maltese, his hero and alter ego, who established him as one of the greatest names in comic books. Born in Italy in 1927 and dying in Switzerland sixty-eight years later, Hugo Pratt, born without an H and with only one T, grew up in the shadow of a fascist father who took him at a very young age to Ethiopia, which was occupied by Mussolini's forces. The teenager developed a fascination for the wide-open spaces of Africa, soon followed by an irresistible attraction to the Indian world. This was the starting point for a life of travel, success, conquests, rare failures, and marked by his veneration for the American cartoonist Milton Caniff, his absolute master.

Several key words emerge from Hugo Pratt's work, inseparable from his life: travel, adventure, erudition, esotericism, mystery, poetry, melancholy... and of course, Corto Maltese, his hero and alter ego, who established him as one of the greatest names in comic books. Born in Italy in 1927 and dying in Switzerland sixty-eight years later, Hugo Pratt, born without an H and with only one T, grew up in the shadow of a fascist father who took him at a very young age to Ethiopia, which was occupied by Mussolini's forces. The teenager developed a fascination for the wide-open spaces of Africa, soon followed by an irresistible attraction to the Indian world. This was the starting point for a life of travel, success, conquests, rare failures, and marked by his veneration for the American cartoonist Milton Caniff, his absolute master.

Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time" is one of the great novels of world literature. The documentary immerses itself in the very own cosmos, spanning 3,000 pages and hundreds of characters, for which Proust's own world was the source of inspiration, and brings Proust's moral portrait of the Belle Epoque to new life.

No synopsis available yet.