In the beginning was the word, time created the image...
Then the image altered the verb...
In the 1990s, after a brief interview with Katia Rossini (then a programmer at Nova, a Brussels cinema undergoing a renaissance in its alternative form) at the Light Cone preview in Paris, I mailed this short film to Brussels, unless perhaps I left it there...
At the time, I came across a batch of Pyral or BASF magnetic tapes for Revox, Uher, Nagra, Akaï, etc. tape recorders. They were on sale, if I remember correctly, at the Emmaüs Compagnons in Grenoble.
I was composing a series of short Super 8 sound films using a player-recorder projector, tape recorders, and various small pieces of equipment for producing, reproducing, and mixing sound and/or images. The film, thus sent to Brussels, was abandoned and forgotten on the shelf in a damp corner of a cinema and was rediscovered later in 2021 by Laurent Tenzer, a programmer at the Nova.
The film would finally find a place in the Nova's programming, but the film equipment had aged and the film strip had been completely transformed by the rotting of the emulsion, and the image now lay open like a sticky, smelly, gaping pussy for the spectators-watching-and-listening. The slow maceration of lost and finally rediscovered cinema gives us a collective film:
Katia, Laurent, and also Mariya Nikiforova (now in charge of preserving and distributing this file as a stage in the film's life at Light Cone), as well as the anonymous individuals who composed the soundtracks mixed by Olivier Fouchard and placed on a film reel that we have never seen and will never see because each original copy and version, created through artisanal processes and the filmmaker's fleeting aspirations, always turned out to be different and renewed, while sometimes bearing the same title, format, and duration...
As we knew, cinema is not the work of a single filmmaker but of a synergy of individual-collectives, and this is also true for experimental cinema. Filmmakers don't always need to meet to work together on material, and this reflection goes beyond the sole framework of cinema: the fragile memory of a civilization in its death throes, fueled by orgasmic impulses and consumerist orgies, and our libidos sublimated into objects of desire by this film.
This film was thus constructed and destroyed over 25 years of slow decay, like a vintage wine of which we always keep a bottle or reel hidden in a box or amphora, well hidden from the gaze of a return to moral order: the last gasps of a world forever lost and the Lettrist flavor of a surviving modernity.
Thank you to all those who participated in the films, whether they were actors or viewers, projectionists, or simply indifferent, because whether they like it or not, they are part of the collective works that shape society, as one might understand: "a pretty face of a left-wing intellectual..." (laughs).
Olivier Fouchard, in Saint-Maurice-des-Lions, on December 21, 2021
Directed by: Olivier Fouchard; Katia Rossini; Laurent Tezner; Mariya Nikiforova / LIGHT CONE and Cinéma Nova
Recycled magnetic soundtrack in voice-over: Anonymous
1 PRINT IN DISTRIBUTION
|
distribution format |
Digital file on server (2K) |
|
screen |
16/9 (single screen) |
|
speed |
18 fps |
|
sound |
sound |
|
original language |
French |
|
rental fee |
25,00 € |
