Frédérique Devaux

Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.

Stéphane Marti is a teacher and film-maker who, since 1976, has been expounding the plasticity of experimental cinema, freeing it from the dominant codes of narrative cinema. An avid defender of Super-8mm film (which he has been using for 30 years), he has fought for the acknowledgement of its excellence as a film-making tool. His work, which screens in festivals and at international events, has been the subject of numerous interviews and articles. Flamboyant, baroque and sensual, his work revolves primarily around the question of the body and the sacred.

Marcel Hanoun, one of the most innovative of filmmakers, gives us what he names "a lesson in cinema." Frederique Devaux and Michel Amarger filmed this piece at his country house, composing an abundantly rich portrait. Film clips and sparks of theoretic bravura testify to the feverish creativity and the drunken agitation behind which lurks the ever-composed voice of the filmmaker.

Cinexpérimentaux is a series of documentaries on experimental filmmakers, produced and directed by Michel Amarger and Frédérique Devaux. N°8 is dedicated to the most important European cooperative Light Cone created in 1982 in Paris.

Portrait of experimental filmmaker Nicolas Rey.

The fortuitous meeting of two women to the identical first name, Lucy, who formerly loved the same man, Jonathan, induced, in this film, of the polysemous variations on the memory, art, and the difficult relationship between creation and emotional life. Dehumanized by an exclusive artistic practice, the man lost his reference marks little by little. "Lucy en miroir" wants to be, also, a shifted and transverse second reading of "The Contempt" ("Le Mépris") of Godard, by a step more plastic than analytical or conclusive.

While filming a portrait of Dutch filmmaker Jaap Pieters, he evoked memories of a Lebanese friend who had disappeared, and his desire to trace his footsteps / to track him down. This project matched our own desire to learn about the state of Lebanese cinema today. We offered Jaap Pieters to travel together to Lebanon to seek out filmmakers doing research on the moving image. We met Mahmoud Hojeij, Nadim Tabet, Ghassan Salhab, Nesrine Khodr and Lamia Joreige.

Stephen Dwoskin was born in New York in 1939 and began making independent shorts there in 1961. In 1964 he followed his research work to London where he settled and participated in the founding of the London Filmmaker’s Co-op. His experimental films, for which he himself does the camera work, play with ideas of desire, sexual and mental solitude and the passage of time. In his films he also explores representation in cinema, performances, personal impressions and his own physical handicap which has been a source of inspiration for him throughout his career. His sensitive and emancipating works have been the subject of various international presentations.