Leïla Colin-Navaï

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.

The film painting is a simultaneous whole to be retro-lit, its material is taken from biblical laconism: Herod marries his brother's wife, Herodias, mother of Salome. John the Baptist condemns this union and is imprisoned by Herod, who nevertheless fears eliminating him given the reputation of the prophet. At a banquet that Herod offered to his hosts, Salome performs a dance that exalts the generosity of Herod ready to perform under word in front of his hosts, a wish to Salome. Herodias advises him to ask for the head of John the Baptist.

The turn of a year in a snowy village in Sweden documents the need for change and continuance. A collective film about rites and times. Dala-Floda, Sweden, has 680 inhabitants. In the depths of the blue light of winter, six filmmakers ask themselves what it means to start a new year. Emerging locals formulate their views on time and our need for rituals and reoccurring events. Their answers parade poetically through the snowy and cold village landscape. A sort of time travel takes place and recalls ordinary as well as extraordinary memories and identities. The commonplace is our need for measuring time, our need for a beginning and an end. A ninety-year-old woman shows a way out of the never-ending dream phase of the evoked Phantom Carriage (Selma Lagerlöf) and exclaims: "Really, you ought to reset yourself. You have to feel completely at zero again".

In the early '80s, this collective of artists invented a style of cinema made in 4 hands, where each of the protagonists is also a filmmaker.

Wings white, she's red, wings scream, she sings, wings fly, she moans, wings rise, she hides, wings move, she teaches me. Leila, night name, exhumates my childhood memories and introduces me to the marvelous.

Film and Performance by Leila Colin-Navai.

This episode of Carnets filmés, Délices lointains, which spans the year 2004, reaches its climax in its last part with my trip to Mexico with the photographer Barbara Peón Solis.

A reflection on the landscape and a dialogue with the welsh poet Dylan Thomas. Images are in-camera editing, three Super 8 cartridges of three minutes by chapter. All four chapters or ‘territories’ are dialectical connexions between sound and image, improvisation related to the image, and montage thought through the sound.