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In the presence of Christoph Girardet and followed by a discussion with the filmmaker
As part of a joint program, Périphérie and Light Cone have put together an epilogue to the 28th edition of the festival Rencontres du cinéma documentaire, which is titled From laughter to tears and themed around genre films.
This screening of films by Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller, conceived in a close collaboration with the Light Cone team, holds a special place within the Rencontres du cinéma documentaire organized by Périphérie. This year's edition, titled "From Laughter to Tears", highlights documentaries that bear a resemblance to genre films, which are also the principal source material of the montage films made by the German duo.
The documentaries included in the festival's program adopt codes borrowed from legal dramas, gangster flicks, comedies, road movies, science fiction... as metaphors for the dramaturgy of reality. The use of these recognizable motifs helps to highlight the meaning behind the actions and relations of the people who are filmed.
Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller, for their part, pursue a very similar goal but proceed in the opposite sense, composing their films from found footage: images that are sometimes encountered incidentally but mostly as a result of in-depth research, taken from a variety of sources (archives, television, etc.) but often from classics of Hollywood genre cinema, whose stereotypical characteristics, recurring from film to film, conceal rather than reveal what underlies the mise-en-scène. It takes their choice of images and sounds and their mastery and keen understanding of montage to deconstruct the implicit structures and to expose the internal mechanisms at work within sequences of the source material. Hence, the program includes examples of science fiction (Meteor), action film (Schwertkampf), and melodrama (Home Stories and It Was Still Her Face). Contre-jour and Screen, on the other hand, deploy sensitive studies of perception.
The modes of cinematographic mise-en-scène employed by the duo also share an overarching tonality. Looking beyond the analytic and political dimensions, an air of melancholy emanates from all the films, whether brought on by the spectral essence of the cinematic image or the proximity or evocation of death and absence. In the end, tragicomedy is the underlying genre that is most represented, where humor and drollery sit side by side with gravitas. Matthias Müller speaks to this inherent dimension of the duo's collaborative work: "As long as our work revolves around the dismantling of stereotypes of cinematic representation, there often is a humorous, ironic, sometimes sarcastic undertone to our work. It’s easier for us to laugh about phenomena seemingly detached from us… until we realize that objects in the rear view mirror may be closer than they appear."
Corinne Bopp
Périphérie
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SCHWERTKAMPF
Sword Fight by Christoph GIRARDET 1991 / DCP / color / sound / 3' 30 |
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HOME STORIES
by Matthias MÜLLER 1991 / DCP / color / sound / 6' 00 |
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METEOR
by Christoph GIRARDET & Matthias MÜLLER 2011 / DCP / color-b&w / sound / 15' 00 |
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IT WAS STILL HER FACE
by Christoph GIRARDET 2017 / DCP / color-b&w / sound / 8' 00 |
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CONTRE-JOUR
by Christoph GIRARDET & Matthias MÜLLER 2009 / DCP / color / sound / 10' 40 |
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SCREEN
by Christoph GIRARDET & Matthias MÜLLER 2018 / DCP / color-b&w / sound / 17' 30 |
| address |
Cinéma Le Méliès 12, Place Jean Jaurès 93100 Montreuil France |
|---|---|
| metro | Mairie de Montreuil (line 9) |
| lightcone@lightcone.org | |
| related links |
Rencontres du cinéma documentaire 2023
www.christophgirardet.de Facebook event |
| rates | single rate: 4.00 € |