David Dudouit spent much of his life traveling, and the act of filming was an integral part of his journeys.

Hundreds of meters of film were patiently exposed frame by frame, manually, over the course of shoots that could last hours or even days. From the islands of Finistère in Brittany to Mongolia, India, and China – the breadth of his work is considerable, its singular approach revealing a sensitive, almost magical, relationship to the act of filming.

David was a friend and comrade of many of us at L’Abominable. He developed and printed most of his films here and was a member of the core team that carries the organization.

He passed away in April 2015 from a sudden and devastating illness, leaving us, among all the memories, his images. There are many hours of footage, which he was just beginning to sort through and assemble with the aim of sharing it publicly. Not only remarkable aesthetically, this body of work is also imbued with an undeniable ethnographic and sociological value: Indian workers building a boat, life on Île de Sein, the wildlife of the high mountains, a market in a Chinese metropolis…

David wrote detailed notes about each shot in journals or on the film cans: the type of film stock and exposure values, the beginning and end time of each shoot, air temperature, atmospheric pressure, latitude and longitude, etc. With the agreement of his family, we have taken up his work again, isolating and selecting certain film rolls while preserving their unity. This was a natural decision given the amount of labor and meticulous attention that David had devoted to each shoot, as well as the surprising connections that occur between successive sequences on each roll.

At this time, three films are available:

They are distributed by Light Cone and are shown around the world.

For the L’Abominable team, Stefano Canapa and Guillaume Mazloum