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- Agenda
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Special screening in the presence of the filmmaker
Light Cone and Périphérie present a joint screening for the 30th edition of the festival Rencontres du Cinéma Documentaire entitled "The Voice of Films" that will take place from November 26th to December 2nd, 2025, at the Méliès Cinema in Montreuil.
At the beginning of 2025, the wish to program films with voiceover for the next edition of the festival and the shared amazement upon seeing Being John Smith for the first time rekindled the desire to invite the British filmmaker.
For this program conceived with Light Cone, our choice fell on Home Suite and Blight, two films with similar themes but contrasting formal treatments.
Continuity and counterpoint: on one hand, between a 96-minute direct cinema film made in three continuous shots with a personal voiceover and, on the other, a virtuoso montage made in collaboration with a composer whose score punctuates the poetic elegy of a relentless destruction… Mixing gravitas and humor, John Smith navigates between the personal memories contained in each room of the long-inhabited home from which he is being evicted and his documentation of the actions and words of his neighbors as they fight against the advancement of a construction project that is as unsound economically as it is useless socially.
It could rightly be argued that in Home Suite it is not strictly speaking a voiceover but rather an off-screen voice. This is a deliberate formal choice that will make for an interesting discussion with the filmmaker, whom we’ll have the honor to welcome in person. Regarding the use of voice in his films, John Smith confided to Federico Rossin, "It doesn’t matter if the narration in my films is fictional or directly autobiographical like in Home Suite or the Hotel Diaries series – I always prefer that my presence be as little like a 'character' as possible. It’s the words that matter, not the person behind them. This is why I almost always use my own voice – it’s so familiar to my ears that it seems to have no particular character. I want the identity of the protagonist to remain as vague as possible – this is one of the reasons why I almost always use voiceover: to avoid any visual representation that might limit the spectator’s imagination. It’s very important to me for the voice not to be didactic and for the character to be on equal standing with the spectator." – Corinne Bopp, Périphérie
As an echo to this screening, two other films from the Light Cone catalogue will be presented at the Rencontres du Cinéma Documentaire: John Smith’s Being John Smith (2024), as well as Miranda Pennell's Man Number 4 (2024). Both screenings will take place in the presence of the filmmakers.
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HOME SUITE
by John SMITH 1993-1994 / DCP / color / sound / 96' 00 |
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BLIGHT
by John SMITH 1994-1996 / DCP / color / sound / 14' 00 |
| 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 : La Voix des films
Facebook event |
| rates | single rate: 4.00 € |