La Pudeur ou l'impudeur d'Hervé Guibert. Genèse d'« un des documentaires les plus bizarres »

From July 1990 to February 1991, the writer and photographer Hervé Guibert, stricken with the AIDS virus, undertook at the request of a television producer the creation of his first film, in which he would himself be «both author and subject». Basing their enquiry on the video archives of the writer and on the work-notes of the technician responsible for cutting, the authors of this article reconstruct the genesis of this film, entitled La Pudeur ou l'impudeur (Decency or Shamelessness). They show how the project evolved, from its original situation in the generic framework of Guibert's literary production at this time of his life - self-fiction - to its final form as a documentary on the daily life of an individual suffering from AIDS. The article pays particular attention to the numerous constraints, of both production and montage, confronting the author in his attempt to answer the singular challenge of writing for the cinema. The repercussions of such constraints on the film help in part to explain the problematical reception of the work, which was not televised until January 1992 - in other words, a month after the writer's death.