Les Rencontres Internationales — Dimanche 7 décembre — La Gaîté lyrique — Cinema — Slash Paris

Passé : Dimanche 7 décembre 2014 à 14:00

Déplacement — 14h00 — Grande salle

Anton Ginzburg : Pan

Film exp. — 16mm — couleur — 00:05:45 — USA — 2014 


(English only) Anton Ginzburg Pan, 2014
 6 minutes, 16 mm film
 no sound Film Pan (2014) by Anton Ginzburg, explores the genealogy and interactions of reproduction technologies from 16mm film to video formats. It examines variations of the mechanical gaze and its disembodiment in relation to the architectural representation and historical context. The hybrid aura offers an interplay and reconsideration of temporal and spatial relationships.

Adam Chodzko : Knots

Fiction exp. — hdv — couleur — 00:08:05 — Royaume-Uni — 2013 


(English only) Adam Chodzko Knots, 2013 Single screen video with sound, 10′ In Knots, Adam Chodzko focuses on the remote but important relationship between the artist Kurt Schwitters, in the final years of his life in the late 1940’s, living in poverty and exile in England’s Lake District, and J. Edgar Kaufmann, the wealthy owner of the Kaufman Department Store in Pittsburgh, USA. Kaufmann had arranged for money to be wired to Schwitters so that he could develop a new Merz structure. Chodzko plays with the desire to conclude and tie up the loose and disparate ends of this narrative. He imagines the now empty Merzbarn (Schwitters final work having been removed to a Newcastle museum in 1965) as a vacuum, sucking in thoughts, desires and matter; all caught up in the vortex of a dream-like surreality. Kaufmann had commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design his Pittsburgh office, a structure that itself was also later displaced from its source when donated to the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Chodzko sees the interior spaces that Schwitters and Kaufmann worked within as unstable, flowing, collaged together, as though becoming a Merz themselves, whilst the form of the video also echoes this process of construction and deconstruction. Knots is a mesmerizing combination of fact and fiction, text and moving image building a story about longing, creation and fragmentation, endings and beginnings, networks of people and isolated individuals, separations and notions of home. It was commissioned by Tate Britain in 2012.

Kent Chan : Orphic Oracular

Fiction exp. — hdv — couleur — 00:10:16 — Singapour — 2014

(English only) A woman follows a man through a man-made forest. Night falls and she narrates a tale that is at once distant yet familiar. The man she follows undergoes a transformation. Elsewhere we find a wanderer concocting a recipe and deep at night, in an empty amphitheatre a man performs with fire. Orphic Oracular, as it’s title suggests is a vision of a future that recalls the past.


Louidgi Beltrame : The walking tree

Documentaire exp. — 16mm — couleur — 00:35:00 — France — 2014

(English only) Louidgi Beltrame filme en 16 mm un grand banyan situé dans le jardin botanique de Calcutta. Cet arbre, qui a la particularité de s’étendre en rhizome sur plusieurs centaines de mètres, est approché comme une forêt de clones, un espace métaphysique où des histoires refont surface : l’histoire de l’invention et du développement parallèle de la photographie et de la télégraphie dans le contexte de l’Inde colonisée, le rêve de Linné selon Foucault, des réminiscences du cinéma Bengali de Ritwik Ghatak et de Satyajit Ray où réel et fiction se sont rencontrés.


Lina Selander, Oscar Mangione : Silphium

Vidéo — hdv — noir et blanc — 00:22:09 — Suède, Allemagne — 2013

(English only) In the first sequences of Lina Selander´s new film a story is told about the ancient, now extinct, plant silphium. The plant grew on the coast outside the North African town Cyrene—a settlement of Greeks from the overpopulated island of Thera in 630 BC—which became the main town in the Greek colony, situated in today´s Libya. The plant was famous for its medical usage (it was used as a contraceptive and abortifacient) and for its richness in flavour, which made it the base of the colony’s export. Its importance for the economic wealth was so crucial that the image of silphium was imprinted on the coins. When exploitation of the plant led to extinction, the city declined. As is often the case in Selander’s works, the film builds on layers of images and meaning, layers that link history and pre-history to contemporary society, and in which nature as a prerequisite for life is one of the focal points. The human strive for development and expansion, the desire for control over nature, and above all—visual control, depiction and surveillance, is always met by another contradicting force. The nature looks back at us, its eyes empty—a reoccurring image in Selander’s film. In Silphium this double movement of visual and earthly mastery and its opposite—loss of visual control, awareness of vulnerability—is first expressed in a shot of the famous 16th-century painting The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein. The ambassadors are depicted together with the emblems of wealth and superiority of the countries they are the representatives for. A contradicting image is hidden until you view the painting from a specific angle, but when you do a human skull becomes visible, the sign of mortality. Selander lets the image oscillate in and out of visibility; the painted image emerges as in a rupture of light in the dark whilst mumbling voices count—numbers, years maybe. The sound fragment is a loan from Chris Marker´s 1962 film La Jetée—another important point of reference. The films narrative tells the story of how a man is used in time travel experiments in order to save the world. He travels through sediments of memory and images, much in the same way as Selander’s film, only to return to his beginning.

De l’autre côté — 16h00 — Grande salle

Jorunn Myklebust Syversen : Cyrk

Fiction documentaire — hdv — couleur — 00:20:19 — Norvège — 2014 


(English only) In Cyrk we meet the Circus Arnardo and the people who work there. The film stylises the life of the circus and its main character. Through the interplay of fact and fiction, the film investigates the tricks and devices used in our various forms of media and our different ways of perceiving the world. Cyrk wishes to challenge our need to understand and find meaning in the things we are asked to take on trust. Exploring the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity, between body and mind, the film conveys both the physical and the emotive aspects of the main character’s story of grief and loss. Thematically, it revolves around the fear of meaninglessness as a human disposition, which we confront by seeking structure in the ideas of religion, ideology and culture. It also raises questions about the way this search for meaning, order and system — on both the private and the social level — can lead to the categorisation and stigmatisation of certain groups and individuals.

Cristina Picchi : Zima

Documentaire exp. — hdv — couleur — 00:11:27 — Italie, Russie — 2013 


(English only) A portrait of a season — a journey through North Russia and Siberia, through the feelings and thoughts of the people who have to cope with one of the world`s harshest climates; a reality where the boundary between life and death is so thin that is sometimes almost nonexistent, where civilization constantly both fights and embraces nature and its timeless rules and rites. In these remote places, people, animals and nature itself become elements of a millennial yet unpredictable script, in which physical and mental endurance play an important role as much as chance does, where life and death constantly embrace each other. A reflection on fate, adaptation and the immutable cycles of existence.

Pierre Edouard Dumora : Evil Men Do

Fiction documentaire — hdv — couleur — 00:50:00 — France, Maroc, USA — 2014

Un homme part dans le désert du Sahara rechercher le Géant qui lui a sauvé la vie. Épuisé par sa quête, il s`écroule sur le sable. Il se réveille, masqué, dans une forêt américaine.

Pierre Edouard Dumora explore les mythologies personnelles et le recours à l’imaginaire comme moyen de composer avec le réel. Ses films associent rêves et visions, et mêlent différents lieux, époques et mondes, souvent liés par la voix d`un conteur. Le son est l`élément central de son travail en ce qu`il transforme l`image, révèle l`invisible et ouvre de nouvelles dimensions dans l`espace et le temps. Pierre Edouard Dumora est diplômé du Fresnoy.

Condition humaine — 18h00 — Grande salle

Sandro Aguilar : False Twins

Fiction — hdv — couleur — 00:21:00 — Portugal — 2014 


(English only) Born in 1974 in Portugal, Sandro Aguilar studied film at the Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema. In 1998 he founded the production company O Som e a Fúria. His films have won awards at festivals, such as La Biennale di Venezia, Gijón, Oberhausen and Vila do Conde, and have been shown in Torino, Belfort, Montreal, Clermont-Ferrand among others. Retrospectives of his work have been programmed at Rotterdam IFF and BAFICI.

Theo Prodromidis : Towards the Bank of the Future

Fiction exp. — hdv — couleur — 00:07:38 — Grèce — 2013 


(English only) “Towards the Bank of the Future” observes and engages with two conceptual axes. The first axis derives from the analysis of Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, where Aristotle presents the problematic of a definition of the “work of man”. In the same way that Aristotle sets the work of man in motion, this form of a life that is activated by the operation of Logos, Cavafys repositions life, or a form of life at least, in the sphere of History, a history of action, an action beyond a simple livelihood (ζῆν). At this exact point, the work focuses on the second axis, on the concept of historicity, thus the specific position and use of History in the work of Cavafys. The poet frequently narrates in his works, of a man who is historically located either in the classical or the modern times.The above element is the one that transforms the work of Cavafys to a significant moment of modernity in poetry. The displaced historicity of the form, where the atemporal collides with the historical.

Sam Smith : Form Variations

Fiction exp. — hdv — couleur et n&b — 00:05:28 — Australie — 2014 


(English only) “Things are never by themselves. Neither are we. They are among themselves and linger in our surroundings. And we sometimes see them, and us among them, as things among things. Yes, but not quite, not only.” This is how Jan Verwoert starts his text ‘Enter the Eerie Thingscapes’ on Sam Smith’s video installation ‘Form Variations’ (2014). The work, shot in the widescreen CinemaScope ratio, is an atmospheric looping meditation on cinema’s relationship to space and things. The non-narrative structure coalesces object, figure and location into a series of composed vignettes that swing between the hyperreal and the surreal. Key to the work are two specific references from the beginning of Michelangelo Antonioni’s ‘L’Eclisse’ that illuminate ideas that lie subtly in the fabric of the 1962 film. Specifically, the opening shot in which the character of Riccardo`s arm is perceived first as inanimate form, then revealed as flesh.

Soren Thilo Funder : First Citizen (House of the Deaf Man)

Fiction exp. — hdv — couleur — 00:12:30 — Danemark — 2013 


(English only) First Citizen (House of the Deaf Man) 2013, HD Video, 12’30” First Citizen (House of the Deaf Man) opens in a small room, where a therapist is in consultation with a young man. Through the use of hypnosis, the young man is experiencing a ma¬nipulation of his unconscious motivation. A feeling of debt is implanted in him through psycho-suggestion. First Citizen (House of the Deaf Man) proposes the idea that the indebt¬edness of the citizen is not only a causality of a flawed eco¬nomic system, but also the last relation that connects the citizen to a community. The only sure way to be part of any power relation is to enter the creditor/debtor relationship. Debt might hence be something that the citizen uncontiously desires — as the only means of experiencing community. First Citizen (House of the Deaf Man) paints an awry portrait of the indebted man with a little help from Goya’s painting ‘Duel with Cudgels’.

Knut Asdam : Egress

Fiction exp. — hdv — couleur — 00:41:00 — Norvège — 2013

(English only) Egress is a narrative set in a gas station in the edgelands of Oslo. The main characters work at the bottom of the oil company hierarchy and are engulfed in the everyday and the dark economic and psychological shadows of their society. Egress is the story of a young woman who deals with her every day work situation with independence and stubbornness in her work and life in the periphery of the city. The film shows relationships between control and independence, about labour, class and work, but it is also a poetic film about a socially insecure edgeland of the city—and about a psychological flipside or cost of the everyday, somewhere near the bottom of the huge economic ladder of the oil industry which secures Norway`s stability. Egress` world is a world of social instability and economic insecurity as part of a society undergoing major changes. Egress is shot entirely on “location” in Oslo`s Groruddalen, mainly between an apartment complex and a gas station. The film is an experimental fiction built up from documentary material which mixes the environment- and character-based to talk about contemporary society.

Séance de clôture — 20h00 — Grande salle

Claire Denis “Voilà l’enchainement”

Filmer les mots de Christine Angot, des mots qui disent ce que nous oblitérons. Je dis cela, oblitérer, peut-être qu’il y aurait un mot meilleur pour exprimer cet enchainement inévitable que pressens sans doute l’homme noir. Ce piège.