Passeur
Swinburne Alternative Film Club
Passeur: a person who helps to cross a river with a small boat and, by extension, a person who helps to go clandestinely through a border or a “no-trespassing” area. There is also the idea of passing something to someone. Daney explained the term in an interview when asked how he would define himself: “I like this small word: passeur. I remember a fantastic article by Jean-Louis Comolli about Eric Dolphy entitled ‘the passeur’. (…) The passeurs are strange: they need borders but only to challenge them. They don’t want to be alone with their treasures and at the same time, they don’t really care about those to whom they pass something. And since ‘feelings are always reciprocal’, we don’t really care about them either, we don’t pass anything to them and we often empty their pockets”.
