Clément Cogitore

She losses her sight. Once back among friends and family: blindness, isolation and a strange perception of the bodies around her. Rejection of this changes and an abrupt decision to put an end to it all. In the peacefulness of early morning, the terms of a new shared existence take shape.

Thirty-four year old Ramsès has established himself as a clairvoyant in La Goutte d’Or, Paris. A shrewd manipulator and something of a poet, he built a sound business consoling people. Elusive and dangerous youths, freshly arrived from the streets of Tangier, disrupt his business and the whole neighbourhood. Until the day Ramses has an actual vision.

For years, *The Magic Flute* has been one of the most frequently performed operas at the Aix-en-Provence Festival. After an eight-year absence, Mozart’s work is now back on the programme. Clément Cogitore interprets the plot as a modern coming-of-age story: Tamino and Pamina leave the world of childhood behind and enter a reality in which beauty is fragile and truth is uncertain.

Afghanistan, 2014. As the withdrawal of troops approaches, Captain Antarès Bonassieu and his squad have been assigned a surveillance mission in a remote valley of Wakhan, on the border of Pakistan. Despite Antarès and his men’s determination, control of the secluded valley will slowly fall out of their hands. One dark night, soldiers begin to mysteriously disappear in the valley.

Amin, a young illegal immigrant, has recently joined a group of other illegal immigrants camping in the forest. With every night comes the opportunity to attempt sneaking into the dockyards and hiding under a truck.

A filmic essay/poem blending fictional images and archival footage from the Pathé and Gaumont collections from the early XXth century. Based on two figures/characters and paced by their interior monologues, Chroniques explores the mythologies of exile and exodus. From the grain of stock footage to the pixel of digital image, this film peruses the history of Europe the way we peruse a family photo album : between personal account and fictionalization.

In the middle of the Siberian taiga, 450 miles from the nearest village, live two families : the Braguines and the Kilines. Not a single road leads there. A long trip on the Ienissei River, first by boat, then by helicopter, is the only way to reach Braguino. Self-sufficient, both families live there according to their own rules and principles. In the middle of the village: a barrier. The two families refuse to speak. In the river sits an island, where another community is being built : that of the children. Free, unpredictable, wild. Stemming from the fear of the other, that of wild beasts, and the joy procured by the immensity of the forest, unravels a cruel tale in which tensions and fear give shape to the geography of an ancestral conflict.

Clément Cogitore adapts a short ballet excerpt from Jean-Philippe Rameau's Les Indes galantes, with the help of a group of Krump dancers and three choreographers on the 3rd Stage of the Paris Opera: Bintou Dembele, Igor Caruge, and Brahim Rachiki. Krump is a dance style that originated in the ghettos of Los Angeles in the 1990s. It emerged as a result of the riots and brutal police repression that followed the beating of Rodney King.

Les Indes Galantes (The amorous indies), is an opera-ballet created by Jean Philippe Rameau in 1735. He was inspired for one of the dance by tribal Indian dances of Louisiana performed by Metchigaema chiefs, in Paris in 1723. Clément Cogitore adapts a short part of the ballet by mobilizing a group of Krump dancers, an art form born in Los Angeles black ghetto in the 1990s. Its birth occurred in the aftermath of the beating up of Rodney King and the riots, as well as police repression it triggered. Amidst this coercive atmosphere, young dancers started to embody the violent tensions of the physical, social and political body. Both the tribal dance performed in Paris in 1723, and the rebelious Krump dancers of the 1990s shape a reenactment of Rameau’s original libretto, staging young people dancing on the verge of a volcano.

The story is one of an architect that has lost his inspiration and goes looking for those motivations that pushed him as a youngster to take up the profession. Inspiring him was the baroque movement and all of its artifices: the Guarini in Turin and the Borromini in Rome. The film’s central story ends up being the love story that develops between architecture, artistic inspiration and feelings.

Tucked away in their Moscow apartment, Ely and Nina Bielutine jealously guard one of the most significant and mysterious Renaissance art collections in Russia. Surrounded by their crow and cats, under the watchful eye of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Rubens, Ely and Nina live in a world of their own, a fictional realm where art and lies have gradually gotten the upper hand over reality.

For the 30th anniversaire of FIDMarseille about thirty directors have done us the honor of offering us some very beautiful short films.

Cogitore pays tribute to the Carnival of Basel, an event held in the eponymous town in Switzerland since the Middle Ages. The Morgestraich marks the beginning of the carnival activities when the lights are turned off at exactly 4 am and groups of musicians parade through the streets with lanterns to the sound of pipes and drums. The piece features elaborately dressed carnival participants against a dark backdrop, walking continually toward an invisible crowd.

This work is conceived around the reuse of television footage of one of the protest demonstrations against the Mubarak regime during the second revolution in 2011, in Cairo's Tahrir square.

Previously focused on Asian directors, “Jeonju Digital Project 2007” takes a look at Europe. The Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa, the German filmmaker Harun Farocki, and the French filmmaker Eugène Green participated in this project.

Hundreds of small luminous screens float above a human sea : a concert audience takes pictures with their cell phones of a scene outside the frame. Like the subtitles of an absent song, or the inner voice of an invisible narrator, verses from R.M. Rilke’s "Duino Elegies" punctuate this enormous collective wave of energy redolent of a digital ceremony.

Video performance made using a lorry, a generator and a 16mm projector, Travel(ing) compares the reality of an experience with its representation in film.

Archive film of the Lascaux cave

The sense of rituals and the manifestation of the sacred has underpinned all of Clément Cogitore's oeuvre, inspired by gatherings, communal phenomena, and the expression of beliefs of today, be they erratic or diffuse, or without a defined subject. The spread of images and the way in which they have become commonplace constitute the off-screen "narrative" of this approach: the artist confronts and responds to this with a visual intensity and a sense for storytelling that borders on the fantastic.

The starting point of the video installation devised by Cogitore is based on two unexplained phenomena having physical origins : the supposed perception of sounds emitted by the Northern Lights, and the appearance of a mysterious luminous object in Alaska. In both cases, superstitions and the Inuit and Saami belief systems have disturbed the quest for scientific explanations.

Follow in real time the peregrinations of a small pack, prisoner and resigned, recount death like a children's tale, share the twilight between tranquility and terror. Film the fence as one would a still life.

For the making of "Assange Dancing", Cogitore used an amateur video shot and published online by the DJ of a club in Reykjavik in 2011. It shows the activist and Wikileaks founder dancing on a semi-deserted dancefloor.

October 22, 2010: the nuclear-powered submarine H.M.S Astute left the Edinburgh naval base on a personnel transfer mission.

The great works of the past portray abundant testimonies, and are imbued with secrets and are teeming with mysteries. Beneath the surface of the painting, details awaken, to recount the spirit of the times and the vagaries of History, such as wars, revolutions, economic transformation, scientific discovery, beliefs and schools of thought.