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SCRATCH COLLECTION 2019!

A NEW FILM SERIES
Light Cone is pleased to launch a new annual film series in 2019, Scratch Collection. This will be a voyage through our catalogue of 5,000 films, with an aim to draw up a great atlas of worldwide experimental cinema and thus reassert Light Cone as an open and thriving collection.

Each year, Light Cone will entrust the programming of this new screening series to a guest (film historian, curator, programmer, filmmaker) who will be granted a residency with the task of revisiting the history of experimental cinema through the exploration of this extraordinary collection; without any encyclopedic pretension, since it is not a question of constituting an anthology of classics, the programmer in residency will be invited to take a fresh and singular look at Light Cone's film catalogue, marked by his or her own subjectivity - including possible lapses and obsessions... Each annual edition will thus present itself as a rediscovery of a film collection in perpetual evolution.

The 2019 Scratch Collection screenings will take place at the Luminor Hôtel de Ville (Paris 4th) and will run parallel to our monthly Scratch Projection screenings at the Studio des Ursulines (Paris 5th), our biennial Scratch Expanded night at the Voûtes (Paris 13th - an event dedicated to expanded cinema forms), and our various partnership screenings, such as those organised in collaboration with Le BAL at the Cinéma des Cinéastes (Paris 17th).

GUEST PROGRAMMER 2019: FEDERICO ROSSIN
We have entrusted the programming of this first edition to Federico Rossin, film historian and programmer (Lussas, Cinéma du Réel, Filmmaker, etc.), to whom we had already proposed a carte blanche to Scratch Projection in January 2018 (Faceness). During a two-week residency at Light Cone, Federico Rossin immersed himself in our collection to craft his own history, a poetic rather than scientific approach, marked by his point of view and his personal history as a programmer.

How is a film collection built? How can we reconstruct its history, the dynamics that compose it and the guidelines that have led to its constitution in the making?
As a programmer and historian, I consider this immersion in the mare magnum of almost forty years of Light Cone's history and more than a hundred years of experimental film history to be a rare cinephile privilege. It is a unique pleasure to be able to navigate through a film archive, follow its veins and joints, rethink its structures and deconstruct its tensions and fabrication.
Perusing the Light Cone collection through 7 programmes (44 films, from 1925 to 2018, 47 filmmakers from 11 countries) is a challenge and a game of composition through which I have sought to bring to life an ensemble as organic as it can be, through a work of juxtaposition and references that creates unexpected dialogues between the works, the authors and the distinct historical periods they are going through. The axis I have chosen is to consider the constituent elements of cinema, and to think of experimental cinema as a kind of alphabet primer of the 7th Art. The frame, the projection, the camera, the film time, the dialectical relationship between the different media, the cinema as an ecstatic experience, the film as a "mental thing" and its links with the unconscious, light and colour: these are the bases on which I have built these programmes and the theoretical-critical constraint that I have imposed on myself during these endless hours of viewing and reviewing, not without doubts and without regrets, without inclusions and exclusions.
It is a rigorous and disorderly, structured and playful ensemble, a very personal and subjective example of winding and dismantling: I thought that Light Cone's collection could really teach us to see, as if it were the first time, cinematographic expression in its absolute and radical beauty and simplicity.
- Federico Rossin

DISCOVER THE FILM PROGRAMMES
Screenings introduced by Federico Rossin

Thursday, February 21, 2019
THE FRAME IS A MASK

Thursday, February 28, 2019
TIME IS AN INVENTION

Thursday, March 7, 2019
YOU CANNOT STEP IN THE SAME RIVER TWICE

Tuesday, March 12, 2019
THE WORLD AS A REPRESENTATION

Thursday, April 4, 2019
COSMOGONIES

Thursday, May 2, 2019
DO-IT-YOURSELF FILM KIT

Thursday, May 16, 2019
THREE NOVELS OF LIGHT

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