Film Format: 16mm

The seaside as a cloudy apparition… a roll of 16mm film shot once in 2008 rewound and re-shot in 2010… ‘John Price’s The Sea Series: Landfall in Lilliput is beautiful example of the diary format. He breaks even further with documentary tradition, showing us silent images of children playing and layering them with a document of clouds. With no verbal narrative or other contextualization, we are left to discover the author’s meaning and truth for ourselves. To do this we must examine our own cultural signifiers and internal constructs to discover the film’s meaning. For this reason, it might be…

The procedure of separating and extracting certain aspects of a scene by adjusting the focus of a series of frames in succession according to various organizational patterns is developed in Retour d’un repère in a particular way. While the filmic operations are structured in relation to a limited space (a branch over a 19c duck pond), the filmic process rests on a visual transformation of a pantoun, a verse form borrowed from literary rhetorics, which characteristically transforms itself gradually and continuously in a precise manner.

Certaines observations is a two-projector-one-screen piece : the two reels – one B/W (positive) print, one W/B (negative) print -, struck from the same negative, should be projected superimposed on a single screen. If the two projectors are not locked in sync, the projectionist may occasionally stop one of them briefly to try to keep the two pictures in sync. The person projecting may also move one projector slightly, placing the two images side by side momentarily. The two reels should be re-superimposed afterwards. The film’s title stems from Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy where certain observations are used…

Couleurs mécaniques presents, in the order they were filmed, six different viewpoints of a merry-go-round. In each case the focus is adjusted so as to select, isolate and inscribe parts of the filmed scene onto the film strip in a way that allows elements of color in movement to be recombined in a particular manner during the projection of the film. Couleur mécaniques shares similar concerns to those found in Roulement, rouerie, aubage.

Roulement, rouerie, aubage takes two paddle wheels on the Sorgue for its subject. Structured in the camera without any editing, the film makes use of a series of cross-references that are set up between two operating mechanisms : a selection of elements belonging to the rotating wheels and a certain number of visual features accentuated by the filming procedures chosen to record the frames. On the screen the image remains continually on a borderline in between the graphic or photographic characteristics and the representation, thus allowing one to shift regularly from one to the other way of seeing things. Roulement…

China seen from Beijing May 1988, a year before the Spring 1989 Tia’nanmen rebellion, where the ancient traditional philosophies and social practices confront the political and economical ideological ambitions of the State. Music by François Alexis Degrenier.