Mer of Martine Rousset

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To contact us : labo@l-abominable.org

Terminus for you, by Nicolas Rey, takes us on a strange journey. That of passengers in the Paris metro. They use a moving railway which takes them from one platform to another, from one line to another and from one destination to the next. What do we actually see ? The thick grain of the black and white film composes very pictorial images. Geometric shapes come and go. The faces of people come into view and then flit away. Glimpses of words, titles torn from posters, are interspersed between these fleeting encounters. This playfully introduces different chapters. Love, solitude, couples, etc. The highly polished soundtrack artfully introduces other elements. You have to listen carefully to appreciate the subtle details, like the faces which emerge from the flames blown by a fire-eater. Thus, the soundtrack evokes a variety of atmospheres: that of fairground, of a circus, and the lazy waters of a river flowing between its banks — the Seine no doubt — setting the pace and commenting, like the posters, on the endless stream of passengers. The filmmaker ingeniously presents people according to affinities: mocking young girls in a hurry, tired old couples… This is a real comédie humaine presented to us — in a few fragments and a small number of shots. Then, a few minutes from the end, the cinematic process reaches the outermost limit and the images disintegrate. The film itself seems to decompose and the faces only leave their final impression on the canvas. Painful spectres, during three minutes, follow one another before giving way to a last joke played by the author. This short visual essay, on the borderline between the documentary — he seizes an everyday situation — and avant-garde film — to which he pays a tribute — defies, with irrepressible joy, any narrow classification. It freely combines painting, photography and cinema and reveals a passion for reality and a love of humanity to which the filmmaker has already accustomed us. (BB)

http://www.lightcone.org/en/film-1229-terminus-for-you.html

Africa, 2003: the mechanisms of memory.

I shot the image of a landscape and buried simultaneously a film strip in the same place where the sequence was shot: the emulsion, the victim of erosion is thus subjected to biochemical degradation. The result of these natural processes of decay are then conserved in the state of their dissolution. Those two images, and their negative versions, are then entangled together thanks to double exposure and bi-packing techniques.

These landscapes in fusion, it’s the logic of a world that reveals itself. A bipolar world, where invisible takes shape with the visible, where the first dissolves itself into the second and vice versa.

 

Despite the stress and anguish associated with living in the city, as a place it remains a inexhaustible source of inspiration for those who take the time to walk around and observe. Here Stefano Canapa delivers a poetic panorama of Paris with his short film, PROMENAUX. The film-maker takes us on foot, via metro, and bus through the city of light to capture some unique images. At first it’s just a take on reality, a game of observation amongst an anonymous crowd. Then it’s a strange night fall with words from Rimbaud with the search for new images becoming primordial. In the morning we discover a fascinating reality, a space without limits, fluctuating in a dreamlike state. Time seems suspended in this work of art that wavers between documentary and private diary. It’s a subtle study, in black and white, of the actions and behaviors that have no purpose beyond their presence. An original soundtrack contributes to the successful impression of a sleepwalk through Paris. 

On December 9 1998, Charlemagne asked me to bring friends to his piano concert at an opening at the Gérard Piltzer gallery in Paris, and to bring a movie camera. I shot two rolls of super-8 tri-x at 9 frames per second and recorded the sound on mini-disc. I forgot about the rolls of film left him undeveloped for a year and a half. When I found them and processed them as negative, I was surprised with the results and I blew them up onto 16 mm positive high-contrast stock. I then contact printed the positive 16 mm to negative 16 mm and optically printed frame by frame through these positive and negative master rolls onto color negative stock throughcolored filters, following a precise notation of the concert music. I chose the following principles :
-The 6945 notes played in the concert correspond to 6923 frames of super-8 film that were shot. No frames are left out or printed twice.
-Speed of playing controls speed of frame succession.
-Discordant diminished fifths are translated into the following methods of visual discordance for the seven parts of the concert in a attempt to replicate in the visual cortex the harmonic overtones that arise in the temporal lobe when listening :
#Flicker between negative and positive,
#between opposites on color wheel (red/green),
#between opposites in retinal cone sensivities (red/green),
#between different flicker frequencies (frequencies beating in discordance);
#clusters of b/w negative and monochrome frames to create overtonal retinal afterimages,
#left/right screen masking and mirror image printing,
#crossfading between negative and positive images.
#When more than two notes are played,the additional colors correspond to the complexity of sound frequencies.

The final result is at once a diary film, a document of the concert, a structural flicker film, a hand-processing film, a graphic representation of music, and a attempt to apply cognitive principles in sensation and perception to film art.

A self-portrait which erases itself, leaving place to a dance of luminous rhythms. Shot originally on 9.5mm, the film was contact printed on b&w high contrast positive 16mm film. Thanks to Mr Eliopoulos, Laurent Huyart, Large Films, Mahine ROUHI, MTK and Light Cone.

« the  sea  is a  language   whose   meaning  we  have   lost »  (Jorge Luis Borges)  

The  mediterranean  sea  . this one.   the  sun .
writings  on  the  water  ?
the  violent  sound  of  the  wind’s  waves  .
the  wild  voice of  the  water’s writings  .
a   few    childish     fictions   in  the   water’s writings  , certainly 
very  cruel  ,
games  of   war .
lost  language .
sovereign      childhood  .
the  sea    is  the   winner  .