Yann Beauvais

Experimental short film

This film considers the subject of HIV and AIDS from a variety of different viewpoints. On the one hand using textual material in both English and French which appears on screen at different speeds and rhythms, and on the other, articulated by the appearance of human voice on the sound track. It is a story of a person confronted with a civilization which promotes death as a way of life.

VO/ID juxtaposes two separate texts, one in French and the other in English. The texts question art and experimental cinema, the role of the market in shaping aesthetic criteria, and current politics... In each of the texts, words common to the other language appear, creating an indeterminacy of the word to this or that speech. This indeterminacy is increased by the many word games created between the two languages. This results in a double reading: vertical and horizontal, favoured by the word for word. The exposure time of each word depends on the rhythmic of each language, but their appearance in white or black is not subject to it. Faced with these texts, two sounds intervene and otherwise disturb the concentration required by the projected texts. The horizontal reading of both speeches is often in clear contradiction with their meaning. This third visual discourse is playful, brittle, mocking the seriousness of the discourse(s).

This film is a series of shot or found sequences (about, of cities that I frequent) which, in the editing, display a fluidity and continuity eluding narration. The sequences are shaped by the editing according to various arrangements which respect the film possible direction: passage from one place to another, from one moment to another. To pass, bridging one point to another, is to transform oneself, become other. The film employs certain leitmotivs which relauch the flow and facilitate diverse transformations of scattered sensations. This film, although renewing lyricism, does not deny formalism which it uses in another manner, while taking into account the meaning/possible meanings produced through linking images and their evocative passage.

"The film is a travelogue of sorts. In 1960 my family lived in Brazil when my father discovered his sister and brother in Moscow, who he hadn't seen for 40 years, were still alive. Since they couldn't leave the USSR we went to visit them regularly for about 15 years. At the time I had my 8mm then a super 8 camera with which I filmed the family, our outings, picnics, markets and their homes… I decided to use this material, which was not very interesting per se, by mixing it with Soviet found-footage of the same period (1960's, 1970's, 1980's). I used feature films, propaganda footage, newsreels, etc. The result is a kind of Khruschev-era mix with a collage of Soviet music and a voice-over of my memories of the Cold War period."

Since October 7, 2023, Israel has been waging war in retaliation for Operation Al Aqsa. The scale of this war and the massacres being carried out are taking on proportions that make it a genocide that does not speak its name. Drawing on a variety of sources, the film aims to question these acts, which refuse to be called into question.

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.