K Samka

Indent notes
Max or the news story that turned cold the whole world on All Saints morning 1925: the suicide of Max Linder, the greatest star of the world! The very first star of a rising art, the Cinema.
This text, MAX, is for me at the same time a light-hearted and mischievous tale, the black legend of a straddling childhood, persisting far behind the childhood itself, but also an ever-repeated funeral song. What we hear here, from the mouth of a lonely one, lost in the middle of a vast space, lost between the deserted stage and this huge abandoned screen, is the address of a dead man to his wife, who died the same day as him, and to the sixteen months old baby-girl they have left behind. Max is doubly a ghost, since there is almost nothing remaining of him, except the walls of a cinema in Paris named after him. The day after his suicide he paid twice for his death. Most of his films were destroyed, pulped or shamefully buried by the family, under their vineyard in Bordelais, almost completely forgotten. There is even no name, no forename appearing on the tombstone in the cemetery of Saint Loubès, his birth place.
It’s this figure of Max, silhouette of man as well as outline of ghost, wearing himself out unravelling the threads of his life and gesture, it’s this that moved me deeply, then fascinated and infinitely troubled. This ghost, by me, calls another ghost whose name I have, and both have summoned me all... simply in order to make themselves heard, at last. For they say that after an actor’s death, there is nothing remaining but sand... I’m happy that Jérémy Lopez whose tight-rope skill and art, specific to heroes, I really admire, has expressed so strongly his desire to don Max’s costume. Jérémy will be standing alone on stage, wearing tailcoat, top hat and white gaiters. Alone, tiny figure in front of a much taller white screen, high, old, worn, put up for nobody, waiting desperately for a shaft of light, for a new life maybe. He will perform for himself and in front of us the remote comedy of his life, for the thousandth time probably. His address to this woman he has dragged to the shadow and to this little girl of whom he hasn’t caught sight during more than few weeks, will not find any answer, as ever, at every attempt.
Max moves about in front of this shadows-theatre, the theatre of buried works, deliberately thrown by others into oblivion. This roundabout of faded, tatty, moth-eaten images, this time-spoiled reels, projected, like the remnants of a wreck thrown by waves, against the screen like on a strand. That’s all this that Max is wearing himself out trying to catch, with the hope to define here something palpable, a well real support, a voice, maybe a hand... Is there a better place than a theatre stage to attempt, as a group and poetically, to make up for such a painful and unfair oblivion?

Wide-open the doors of cheer lunacy!
1905, Pathé Studios, the stage actor Max discovers cinema, a rising art. Revelation and frenzy: he shoots five hundred films, export himself to Hollywood, becomes equal to Charlie Chaplin, even his “teacher”. Morning coat, silk hat, top hat, patent leather shoes, wedding gloves also called “creamy buff”, he invents the funny elegance of the dandy, perfect and hilarious gentleman. Alone on the stage, from his country of the dead, Max Linder is talking to Maud, his sixteen-months-old baby daughter. He tells her everything: greatness in him, his demons, his films – hardly one hundred of them subsisting today – his loves, his career in America and the total darkness he’s in.
1925, they come across the dead bodies of Max and his wife at the Hotel Baltimore, Avenue Kleber. Jérémy Lopez, full member of the Comédie Française, opera hat and white gaiters, plays the wonderful and broken destiny of a forgotten star, leading light, fore runner and genius of the Cinema.