NOMBRILISTIC

Duration: 2 minutes

Could laughter have curative powers? In the 60's, journalist Norman Cousins (who is now professor of Psycho-neuro-immunology at U.C.L.A.) proclaimed to have cured his ankylosing spondylarthritis, an arthritic disease that targets the spine, by splurging on Charlie Chapin and Marx Brothers movies.

Laughter triggers the secretion of endorphins that reduce pain, replacing chemical pain killers. Dr. Henri Rubinstein (neurologist, author of The psychosomatics of laughter) evaluates one minute of laughter as the equivalent of thirty minutes of relaxation.

What interested me first in using laughter was its interactive quality. The simple fact of hearing someone laugh brings a smile to one's face, it's contagious! When laughing, one is more receptive to others, more open, barriers fall, cultural and language differences vanish, the message is clear and it is spreading. I chose to shoot on film the laughter and the navel of several people, of various ages from seven months to seventy years.

When one laughs, the whole body participates in "this activity". The whole body shivers, engulfed in spasms. The part of the body I chose to show with those laughs is the navel. When laughter is real, it comes from the gut, it comes from inside.

The navel is also the opposite of laughter, it's the center. Laughing is not possible when one is centered into oneself, when obsessed with self-importance. It's not possible when one thinks of oneself as the navel of the world. Is it more interesting to laugh or to gaze at one's navel ?