Merlin Dutertre

Sarah is invited to join the club tonight. As the rain of the storm beats on the roof, a group of teenagers gather in a large house to sleep all together. They install the sheets of large beds, then all fall asleep, close to each other.

Pikachu is sick. He and his friends come to my village in Seine-et-Marne hoping to cure him. The film is made from images taken from YouTube that I superimposed onto my home in Voisenon, Seine-et-Marne.

Weeping Willow 3: The Last Night concludes Merlin Dutertre’s Weeping Willow trilogy by returning once more to the unstable contact zone between ordinary lived space and globally circulating fictional imagery. Pikachu, Spider-Man, Mario, and other familiar figures inhabit a recognisable real-world environment under the sign of imminent catastrophe. Convinced that tonight is the end of the world, they move through the film less as heroic protagonists than as displaced witnesses, exhausted icons suddenly exposed to finitude. Built by embedding images found on YouTube into real settings, the film turns some of the most recognisable characters of mass culture into fragile presences. Dutertre does not use them for parody or nostalgic citation alone. Instead, he relocates them within a subdued visual field where the comic, the melancholic, and the apocalyptic coexist without collapsing into a single register.

Sarah is invited to join the club tonight. As the rain of the storm beats on the roof, a group of teenagers gather in a large house to sleep all together. They install the sheets of large beds, then all fall asleep, close to each other.

Pikachu is sick. He and his friends come to my village in Seine-et-Marne hoping to cure him. The film is made from images taken from YouTube that I superimposed onto my home in Voisenon, Seine-et-Marne.

Weeping Willow 3: The Last Night concludes Merlin Dutertre’s Weeping Willow trilogy by returning once more to the unstable contact zone between ordinary lived space and globally circulating fictional imagery. Pikachu, Spider-Man, Mario, and other familiar figures inhabit a recognisable real-world environment under the sign of imminent catastrophe. Convinced that tonight is the end of the world, they move through the film less as heroic protagonists than as displaced witnesses, exhausted icons suddenly exposed to finitude. Built by embedding images found on YouTube into real settings, the film turns some of the most recognisable characters of mass culture into fragile presences. Dutertre does not use them for parody or nostalgic citation alone. Instead, he relocates them within a subdued visual field where the comic, the melancholic, and the apocalyptic coexist without collapsing into a single register.

Weeping Willow 3: The Last Night concludes Merlin Dutertre’s Weeping Willow trilogy by returning once more to the unstable contact zone between ordinary lived space and globally circulating fictional imagery. Pikachu, Spider-Man, Mario, and other familiar figures inhabit a recognisable real-world environment under the sign of imminent catastrophe. Convinced that tonight is the end of the world, they move through the film less as heroic protagonists than as displaced witnesses, exhausted icons suddenly exposed to finitude. Built by embedding images found on YouTube into real settings, the film turns some of the most recognisable characters of mass culture into fragile presences. Dutertre does not use them for parody or nostalgic citation alone. Instead, he relocates them within a subdued visual field where the comic, the melancholic, and the apocalyptic coexist without collapsing into a single register.