Xavier Baert

Xavier Baert works on the visual outline of the body. He creates cinematographic body states which according to the French filmmaker, only cinema can invent. Ghost plays on projection and light phenomenon, on the double exposure of a body on another. The narration which is essential through a slow temporal flood comes within a progression which plays on the working drawing and fading. A ‘ghostly’ fading as it is more a question of the appearance of a body without substance through shadow effects and light loops. The image cast in negative adds to this ethereal space the sensation of unreal space, which however, forms one body with the presence of this shadow in perpetual movement. Fantome reminds us that cinema’s main rights are ‘recording bodies.

Two men making love. The question of the embrace (which encompasses the caress, the look, the kiss, the penetration, the speed of movement, the expression of ecstasy…) give to the film a scenario of examples of editing (disconnection, links, rhythm, interlaced films, alternate editing…). A sometimes figurative logic (make love, to be loving, to enjoy), choreographic (to caress, to interlace, to kiss, to lick, to penetrate), and cinematographic ( to link, to bring together, to move, to embrace…:to mount)

Othello Vilgard, Xavier Baert and Lionel Soukaz filmed a performance by Tom from Beijing: one strips himself naked while the others veil and reveal the film.

Film restored by Yves-Marie Mahé from several recordings made during past screenings, notably in the basement of the L’Etna laboratory. A car journey, then the bedroom. The naked body in bed, sleeping or smiling at the camera, splits in two and overlaps. Accompanied by Christophe’s melancholic pop songs, a raw tenderness emerges.

A queer fiction that pays homage to 1930s Universal horror films and German Expressionism—a sacrificial rite of sex and rock.

Founded in the second half of the 1990s, the experimental film association L'Etna witnessed the transition from film to digital cinema. Its premises, located in the heart of Paris, were unable to withstand gentrification.