Maxime Fauconnier

"The Beginning of Anything"
Carla Frick-Cloupet, 2022

"The Beginning of Anything" seeks to make the invisible visible. Maxime Fauconnier’s found footage film assembles dozens of videos sourced from streaming platforms, depicting people from all around the world reacting to an immaterial threat: a fog.

Amidst the blur, the film offers an ongoing reflection on the act of creation. The material, sourced from YouTube as if it were simply picked up off the ground, shifts the focus from mere production to what can be crafted from it. The film playfully engages with the prefix "any," embracing its resistance to specific content—anywhere, anytime, anyhow. Kicked off by the very first keyword "fog" typed into a search bar, the work process gradually consisted in searching through a multitude of word associations, targeting specific rhythms, languages, locations or ambiences, and building thematic categories that eventually became narrative installments.

Fauconnier and editor Romain Waterlot were the first to play the speculative game, projecting sensations and thematic pivots onto the existing footage. Making "The Beginning of Anything" was about finding the right balance—assembling without imposing, guiding without compromising the viewer’s trust. The film is an exercise in defining without restricting. In this subtle ambiguity, we, as viewers, find ourselves immersed in an unfamiliar language while continuously adjusting to its form. We join in the play as well: we identify some patterns, miss others, and conceptualise new ones. The boundary between structure and perception blurs. The cinematic experience and our trust in it take shape, allowing us to advance blindly, hand in hand.

Each vignette, with its own formal vocabulary (format, image quality, soundscape) enters in dialogue with the others to evoke a simultaneous and collective documentation and viewing experience. The dense variety of subjects create together a journey that is as light and contemplative as it is threatening and violent. We are welcomed here, free and engaged, confronted with the protagonists' perspectives, their voice-over descriptions, and their emotions. The meticulous sound design creates a space where the film’s concept can truly flourish, giving body to the off-screen and to the indistinguishable images, and generating an intricate emotional response within us.

Acting as a ‘tabula rasa’ experience that re-examines the link between content and form, "The Beginning of Anything" brings the viewers, the subjects and the material closer and closer together, in a synergy proposing a subversive definition of the cinematographic object and its boundaries.