COLORS: Contemporary Experimental Films From France

COLORS: 
Contemporary experimental films 
from France 

artist Emmanuel LEFRANT in person, from Paris!

Wednesday, May 17
8PM
Museum of Human Achievement
(call/email for directions themuseumofhumanachievement@gmail.com262.880.6982)Suggested donation $7 / $5 students/seniors

Furthering our ongoing survey of international avant garde cinema, Experimental Response Cinema is thrilled to present an evening of contemporary experimental films and videos from France. The program includes works by Cecile Fontaine, Rose Lowder, and many others. Filmmaker and curator Emmanuel Lefrant will be in person to introduce the films. This is a rare chance to see contemporary French work on original 16mm and digital video.

PROGRAM:

APRÈS LE FEU
by Jacques PERCONTE
2010 / Fichier sur clé USB / color / son / 25 ips / 7? 00A few kilometres from Ajaccio, the burnt earth gives in to the weight of colour. The ground opens up and frees pictorial energies that take over the sky. I see the horizon disappear, but I keep it in my sights. The train continues on its way…

AU BORD DU LAC
by Patrick BOKANOWSKI
1993 / 16 mm / color / son / 24 ips / 6? 00“It is true that the unidentified people being filmed are not there simply for the actions they are performing, but the time that the scene is taking to be completed is also beyond any normal definition. The colors vary, and we are plunged many years back in time, no doubt because the shot is suddenly reminding us of Van Gogh or Gauguin and the color-tones they used. We are not at the side of any identifiable lake, we are swept up in a different sort of space-time context by the light, the movement and the colors that the place evoked in Patrick Bokanowski’s mind. The shore we are on is the quintessence of lakehood, and, as happens in his previous film, THE BEACH, it’s as if the proximity of water metamorphosed everything around, fluidizing all of the matter into endless spirals before our delighted eyes.” – Jacques Kermabon from BREF magazine, March 1994 Music by Michèle Bokanowski.

BOUQUETS 1-10
by Rose LOWDER
1994-1995 / 16 mm / color / sil / 24 ips / 11? 33

I DON’T THINK I CAN SEE AN ISLAND
by BECKS Christopher & LEFRANT Emmanuel
2016 / Fichier sur serveur / color / son / 25 ips / 4? 10A Film of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures.

JAPON SERIES
by Cécile FONTAINE
1991 / 16 mm / color / son / 18 ips / 7? 00

K (EXIL)
by Frédérique DEVAUX
2008 / 16 mm / color / son / 24 ips / 9? 00Two-thirds of K (Exil) consists of images of the women and children who remain at home, alone, while the men leave for a life of exile. These images, always fragmentary (either cut-up or inserted piece by piece within the image as a whole), alternating between negative and positive, complementing or contradicting each other – give an insight into the wrenching separation experienced by those members of the population who remain at home, left to their fate in an inhospitable landscape.
Over what we call the ‘joints’, we will engrave words in French or Kabyle (Berber), echoing the masculine voices of Rachid Adel and Michel Amarger. An original composition by Mr. Djamel Tareb will form the musical sound-track for the film.

PARTIES VISIBLE ET INVISIBLE D’UN ENSEMBLE SOUS TENSION
by Emmanuel LEFRANT
2009 / 16 mm / color / son / 24 ips / 7? 00Africa, 2003: the mechanisms of memory.I shot the image of a landscape and buried simultaneously a film strip in the same place where the sequence was shot: the emulsion, the victim of erosion is thus subjected to biochemical degradation. The result of these natural processes of decay are then conserved in the state of their dissolution. Those two images, and their negative versions, are then entangled together thanks to double exposure and bi-packing techniques.

These landscapes in fusion, it’s the logic of a world that reveals itself. A bipolar world, where invisible takes shape with the visible, where the first dissolves itself into the second and vice versa.

PAYS DÉVASTÉ, LE
by Emmanuel LEFRANT
2015 / Fichier sur clé USB / color / son / 24 ips / 11? 30– What do you see? – A place not suited for humans being Le Pays Dévasté relates to the Anthropocene, the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment.

VOILIERS ET COQUELICOTS
by Rose LOWDER
2001 / 16 mm / color / sil / 18 ou 24 ips / 2? 00Little is necessary for everything to appear differently. The date, the hour, the weather, the space’s layout, one’s glance or presence of mind… can make everything change. The boats sail out of the Vieux port in Marseille to be amongst the poppy fields.

Durée totale de la programmation : 65? 13