Guillaume Alric of electronic music duo The Blaze has launched a multidimensional solo project that comprises an album, a photography exhibition, and a cinematographic triptych. Under his new Enfant Sauvage moniker, the French musician and director premieres the third and final film from his upcoming album, Petrichor, on NOWNESS.
Force Field takes its name from the penultimate track of Enfant Sauvage's debut EP and serves as the closing chapter of an unfolding teenage love story set in the French countryside. The visual trilogy began with Silent Love, which opens with an exposition of a young man looking for reasons to live and love again. The second part, Time to Fall, introduces a girl who flirts with hedonistic excess before meeting the young man at a party one midsummer night.
Inspired by the sights and sounds of his rural upbringing, Alric channeled the wildness of his youth into a project guided by the two staple concerns of most adolescents: the quest for love and freedom.
The Paris-based musician provided further insight into his project, creative process, and life-long interest in photography in an interview with NOWNESS.
The tracklist on Petrichor unfolds like a romantic relationship. What is the story behind the album?
Everything started with the idea of making a book from the photos I made in the small town I come from. Then the idea expanded to include an album and videos that tell this story; the way we lived and the way our pre-internet generation killed time.
The love story between the two teenagers in this trilogy shows the complexity of having feelings for someone in a place where everybody knows each other. Even more so if the soul is wounded. A certain poetry emerges from these situations, which can be violent but also sweet.
What message do you want the audience to take away from the trilogy?
Love is what saves us from despair and we should always believe in it. Even in places where we might feel alone, there will always be a soulmate to help us grow. It sounds cliché but it's an idea that took me a while to grasp.
I come from a small town where, at a young age, emotions were complex and the prospect of a new encounter was rare. One can quickly get locked into a pattern where you avoid trust and commitment. [This is usually] out of fear of not being up to the task or simply because we have not been taught to be the center of attention.
How do you go about building visuals for your music?
For Enfant Sauvage, I remembered scenes that I had lived or that friends had told me about. I sorted them so as not to be too epic because I wanted it to stick to an almost documentary reality. I then started with the beginnings of songs that could fit this narrative and these emotions. Then once the images were shot, I readapted the music to fit the visuals as accurately as possible.
Now that you are a soloist, does the creative process differ from when you created music and videos as The Blaze?
In this case, it was different because I was shooting at home and I was inspired by my memories of my hometown. It's a very intimate, personal project. All the extras in my videos are people I know and the stories I tell are our own. With The Blaze, there are two of us and our inspiration comes from something more universal. With Enfant Sauvage I had a precise field of inspiration to draw from.
What artists have inspired your work as a photographer and director?
I like the photographic work of Raymond Depardon and Thomas Fliche for their way of showing hidden faces with touching humility. As far as directors are concerned, Ken Loach or Bertrand Blier are among those who know how to film humans and one's relationship to life; sometimes tender, sometimes hard, but always with a certain empathy and a strong emotion.