Warning: this film contains explicit images
A man is in love with a sow. She gives birth to piglets. He hangs them. Out of despair the mother commits suicide. There follows an analysis of decomposition, the devouring of shit and the man’s death, his body flying through the sky.
Upon its release in 1974 this film caused a scandal – the transgressive accumulation of zoophilia, “infanticide”, death and coprophaghia triggered battles as impassioned as those provoked by L’âge d’or, which would have delighted Luis Buñuel, who believed that cinema in its usual form exploited only a fragment of the deflagratory resources at its disposal to protest and to dream. Wedding Trough can be classed among those most powerful artworks which imprint unforgettable images and wounds on the memory of the spectator. Pure challenging images, mystical, alchemical and psychoanalytical propositions addressed at an obliterated level of consciousness.
The film is a poem without words which both details a passage through the four elements and above all lays bare the primary impulses which bind man to the world and the animals, the latter shown in the equality of otherness. It is not a matter of anthropomorphism, rather of scrutinizing the conditions of desire, “bestiality”, suffering and aggression. As for the human side – represented by Dominique Garny, a mediating figure and an inspired actor who extricates himself from all explanatory psychology or sociology – it plunges us into a regressive and hallucinatory universe cleansed of all contact with reality in the name of a single inner goal, the exploration of the primal abyss. (Jacquelin Aubenas)
“My character has no specific psychology, nor even less pathology. He is a man of flesh, outside of any precise cultural context, outside of time, he is a ghost who inhabits the screen for an hour. I leave the spectator a total freedom of interpretation: I wanted to put in the film such a multiplicity of signs that one can find matter for teaching or fascination.”
Thierry Zeno
"This extraordinary film was made with very little money. Thierry used 16mm reversal film, utilizing the ends of reels he obtained from friends who worked as TV cameramen. Similarly, I salvaged magnetic tape from my workplace, the Équipe sound studio. For each footage, I cut a length corresponding to Thierry’s. Film professionals looked down on him because he filmed everything on his own, without relying on technicians. Thierry shot this film little by little, just getting by, progressing intermittently, but he had a precise idea and memory of the framing and sequences. He really did a great job, as if he had the entire edit in mind from the start. The first shot had to be the right one. He showed me the film sequence by sequence, when the editing was over. This was how he worked, and that's why it took him so long getting the right splices, the right light, etc.”
Alain Pierre
“Belgium never funded any of Thierry’s films. Everybody agreed to work for free on these two. I found a family, there was no need to talk much. When we saw the film for the first time with Roger Defays, the mixer, everybody ended up crying, because we had fabricated everything, as with animation. Thanks to the Cinémathèque française, the film had a first public screening in Paris. Being enthusiastic about it, Henri Langlois gave a little money so the film could be blown up and turned into a 35mm copy, mostly funded by a Japanese distributor. It was the only money he ever got. Thanks to this negative, 35mm copies could be made and this is how, in 1974, even before reaching any other part of the world, Vase de Noces was released in several movie theatres around Japan.”
Alain Pierre
“Thierry did the framing and the light.... He decided when and how to film the light, and the result displays a quality of image, framing and splicing, many a filmmaker would be jealous of. His black and white is unique. If the film were colored, it would be bad. Thierry worked within a constraint and this is how creation works, and it may be slightly Belgian: you can experiment.”
Alain Pierre
