It doesn’t matter that Maximus Ohanzee Wildhorse really existed. Renamed Maximus Wyld, the hero embodies the “savage”, the untamed and sacrificed rebel. He is the actor of the falls, cut during the editing and erased of all films: “The Shadow”, an emanation of all broken destinies, an expression of the repressed. “It takes shade to create light, it takes enemies to make America”, writes screenwriter Loo Hui Phang, leaving designer Hugues Micol to materialize this absence with his hallucinatory brush, which revisits the entire anthology of cult films from the 1930s to the 1960s.
In this breathtaking and virtuoso staging, everything becomes symbolic, from irony to drama, from documentary scholarship to dreamlike compositions. Faced with the censorship of these decades marked by segregation, the Second World War and McCarthyism, desire arises from transgression, at the origin of a creative eroticism and in tension.
Elliptical spaces left to the imagination
The masses of black ink celebrate the underlying apology of all strategies of diversion, retrace behind the white line of erasure, the occult whitening that produces oblivion. With the figure of the Black, the Japanese, the Chinese, the Indian or the Latino, the dominant ideology of a white America still relevant today which, while advocating justice, the purity of feelings and values, industrializes fantasy and forgetting.
The comic strip, unlike a film, thus invites you to explore the off-screen in the elliptical spaces left to the imagination. Fiction reinvests memory, against “This formidable capacity of cinema to produce images that can neutralize the very reality of lived experience”, as Raoul Peck says so well in the preface to this masterpiece, in a magnificent plea. The black hole lights up in a swirling vortex that escapes control and opens our eyes to the mechanics of amnesia. He sculpts in contrasts and ambivalences the universal dynamic of a reality full of what is shown and omitted.
Black-out, by Loo Hui Phang and Hugues Micol. Futuropolis, 200 pages, 28 euros.
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