Eric Pauwels

Belgian filmmaker Eric Pauwels' meditation on dream, travel and film.

A summer film, of complicity, a film linked to the situation of "now or never" because it is born of encounters, availability, reflections or states of being in motion as time, ultimately a "snapshot" cinematographic.

In Violin Fase, Eric Pauwels twirls the camera around the body of dancer and choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker. Through this process, Pauwels creates a new relationship between camera and dancer, but also between body and dance, dance and cinema. Consisting of a geometrical and minimalist choreographic structure filmed in four uninterrupted takes, the artist’s camera captures a woman dedicated to exploring the boundaries of physical exhaustion.

Motorway, roads, villages of Northern France, Flanders. A man with a Super 8 camera films his route, the villagers and himself. Portraits, self-portrait. As the images unfold a young villager, Josse, is intrigued by the camera’s presence. For the cameraman the lens is an eye with which one films reality, for the villager the camera represents CINEMA, the magic of fiction. Josse accosts the cameraman and leads him across the fields where his girlfriend joins them. The outing becomes their production, with themselves in front of the camera. Games. Gradually diverted by Josse’s enthousiasme the film slides into moments of fiction, until its inevitable breakdown.

A film made of objects, faces and texts; of lost cats, of found pictures, cut-outs, recreations; a poetic subversion in diary form, one that breaks the calendar into a novel, driving relentlessly as a journey to the end of the world.