Pantomime: A show in which the artist expresses himself solely through gestures, facial expressions, and attitudes. Of course, Pierrot, the patron saint of mimes, is the main character in Michel Zumpf's new film. But if he takes care to break down the word to form his title, it is to broaden its scope. PAN TO MIME. It's up to us to play. We can pronounce it in English, because the film goes back and forth on both sides of the Channel, between the rooftops of Paris and the banks of the Thames, between the music of the two languages ​​and with beloved writers: Verlaine and Laforgue, Chesterton, and Dickinson. But it is to ancient Greek that we must return, to the etymology: imitation of everything. This has been the filmmaker's project since Le Géographe Manuel (1996), a project that he takes here to an unprecedented level of sophistication, grace, and musicality: to make poetry out of everything. At the origin of Michel Zumpf's cinema, there is an extraordinary curiosity, a mad appetite to find the beautiful, the remarkable, everywhere, in everything. Curiosity redoubled by a collector's passion. PAN TO MIME is the reordered disorder, by the genius of editing, of a series of collections: of places, books, words, objects, musical instruments, languages ​​(English and French but also Russian, Italian, Japanese, etc.) Collection also, and it is the flesh of the film, of a whole people of living beings: animals, men and women of all ages, renowned actors or musicians, donkey or pig breeders, whose bodies and faces, lovingly filmed, impress the 35mm film with their singular vitality. Words and things of the past, ruins of the Pathé factories or the manor of Saint Pol Roux; landscapes and faces of today. Everything is in tune with the same time, that of the film, its music, and its rhythm, which abolishes the others. If silent cinema has resurrected the forgotten art of pantomime, Zumpf's sound art exhumes and fulfills another promise of the 19th century - that of Baudelaire, of poetic modernity as correspondences and elevation: to grant eternity to everything that passes, to tear the century itself from the century.