Fernand Deligny: Correspondance

On September 12, Éditions L’Arachnéen published Fernand Deligny’s Correspondance des Cévennes, 1968-1996. It covers the thirty-year period when the French educator Deligny didn’t leave the small village of Graniers in the shadow of the Cévennes mountains where he created a network (réseau) to live together with children with autism. During this time, Deligny – militantly opposed to institutions of every kind – developed his research on a way of being « hors langage » (outside of language).

Among his correspondents are not only Félix Guattari, Louis Althusser and the parents of the children, but also Chris Marker, Robert Kramer and François Truffaut, which shows the important role of cinema in this place. It's also in the Cévennes and with the children that Deligny made the film Le Moindre Geste (1971). The book contains 650 letters (a selection out of a thousand) and more than 100 other unpublished documents by Deligny. Éditions L'Arachnéen dedicates a special attention to his work. Most notably, they published the collection L’Arachnéen et autres textes (2008, translated by the Univocal press), the bilingual Maps and Wander Lines - Traces du réseau de Fernand Deligny (2013) and, last year, reissued Deligny’s Oeuvres.

“That’s a lot of words to say: camera-ing can’t bow to the illusions of ‘cinéma-vérité’, and it is definitely something different than pretending there isn’t a point of view.

Robert Kramer to Deligny, May 30

« Tout le monde se doute bien que là – dans le bonhomme – le réel n’y est pas, qu’il est dehors. »

Deligny to Robert Kramer, June 5