The desire to make  FACS OF LIFE resulted from an almost visceral reaction to the videos of Deleuze’s Vincennes seminar of 1975-76, filmed by Marielle Burkhalter and broadcast on Italian Rai Tre by the late-night art cinema  programme “Fuori Orario” in 2006.

Watching the images of  Deleuze’s courses at Vincennes,  we couldn’t avoid imagining the possible trajectories taken by the arrow of his thought in its passage from  the classroom to the realm of life ‘outside’ the university, the daily lives of those who, directly or indirectly, received its wound. Which is why we decided to move to Paris to look for some of the old students  who were in the videos, a bizarre investigation conducted through digital photos Silvia took of the  video images. The resulting trail was part detective, part spy and  part ghost story in which it was often difficult to tell who are the real revenants, the students or us.

Indeed, we realised that from the very beginning the videos of Deleuze’s seminars were like rushes of some non- or not-yet-existent  NOUVELLE VAGUE film. Rushes swirling around an empty centre from which we forged our film FACS OF LIFE, like a reverse spiral or whirlpool which projects the rushes towards a beyond, through the singular trajectories of the characters some 30 years on.

What has emerged from our encounters with Deleuze’s students is therefore neither the summoning of memories of the period from a stable subjective position (able to put in order the unruly whirlpool of events that have marked them) nor a summary nor a philosophical debate among specialists around Deleuze’s thought. It is rather the becoming of a process set off by the encounter itself, the construction of plane of consistency, a life plane (in Deleuze’s own terms), the invention of devices and maps that have produced a series of collective yet singular refrains, machines of clandestine joy and resistance.