Inspired by the poetry of Etel Adnan, Michèle Lamy and Matt Lambert’s new short film is soundtracked by Arca and Lavascar – here, the pair tell AnOther how it all came together
Michèle Lamy first encountered the poems of the Lebanese-American writer Etel Adnan during a trip to Morocco. “I wish I’d known them my whole life,” she tells AnOther. Though she’s always been inspired by poets such as Langston Hughes, she adds: “Etel’s poetry really changed everything. Her poems are a way to connect with my consciousness and emotions, there’s a romance to them, it’s like an instinct for life.” High praise indeed, and so perhaps it’s unsurprising that Adnan’s words played an inspirational role in the multidisciplinary artist’s latest project, Infinite.
Produced in collaboration with the filmmaker Matt Lambert, Infinite is a prequel to Infinite II, an avant-garde performance piece that saw Lamy entangled in a writhing mass of bodies at its Berlin premiere in 2022. In fact, the film was first envisioned years ago, shortly after the pair’s first collaboration, the NSFW project Butt Muscle (also starring Rick Owens). “Soon after she reached out to make a music video for her new music project Lavascar,” Lambert explains. “We had a pretty smooth and collaborative run up to the shoot and then, when we showed her first edits, she hated it! We decided to shelve it indefinitely … ”
Luckily, Lambert picked the film back up last year after Lamy turned him onto Adnan’s poetry, the inspiration for many of the lyrics in her Lavascar project, as well as a new track remixed by Arca (the result of a chance encounter during brunch on the terrasse). “We started over,” he says, “letting Etel’s words take the edit down a much more intuitive and poetic road.”
With choreography by MJ Harper (who notes that Lamy, like Adnan, has the ability to “transport one to an ancient past and a distant future, all at once, in the very same moment”), the resulting film captures a dreamlike journey in lustrous black and white, overlaid with a hypnotic soundtrack. Lamy and Harper dance in unison and hold one another in footage from an Owenscorp furniture atelier outside Paris, as well as the surrounding fields and the drive home. “We were coming down from the catharsis of the shoot and didn’t want to stop the ride,” Lambert explains.
In summary, the filmmaker describes it as “an endless tale of infinite lives”, inspired by his collaborator’s “always-curious mind” and tireless creative drive. This is also a reference to Adnan’s words, which are sung by Lamy on the Lavascar album Garden of Memory: “To chase the Pacific horizons, l need an infinity of lives.” The poetic descriptor resonates with Lamy herself, she says, bringing it back once again to the source material: “It’s connected to the ideas and the feelings inspired by Etel’s poetry and how she talks about ‘infinity’. We know life is short, so we try to make the best of it. I need infinite lives. We all have infinite lives.”
Woven throughout this exploration of infinity are potent examinations of the roles of mother, daughter, and lover. “I was flabbergasted when I became a mother,” notes Lamy (who now produces music with her daughter, Scarlett Rouge). “Now I see it from a better perspective. It has changed my life, even though it also felt very natural to me. I’m not a traditional mother and I don’t view family in a traditional way, but I think I can be a mother of the world.”
Lambert also aimed to tap into this dynamic in Infinite. “I wanted to pay homage to the energy that’s passed between mother and child – the cycle of who teaches or cares for whom and how that shifts over time,” he says. Fingers crossed, the exploration won’t end here. “I see this Infinite series as an ongoing dialogue between Michèle and I – a space to play and test each other.”
Watch Michèle Lamy and Matt Lambert’s Infinite below.
Featuring: Michèle Lamy, MJ Harper, Dominique Ron Rosales, Miles Greenberg, Tom Grand Mourcel, Raymond Pinto, Alma Petit, Tahi Guy Roland, Theo Samsworth, Jackson Carroll . Choreography: MJ Harper. Styling: Jerry Stafford. Director of photography: Christopher Aou. Hair: Laurent Philippon. Make-up: Pablo Rodriguez.
In loving memory of Dominique Ron Rosales.