Nicolas Humbert

People's associations with flora goes back a long way, taking us back to our own roots as well as to new ways of life and creative potential that reveal themselves as we deal with plants.

The space of a voice gives what is said its real meaning. In it you can feel what is actually behind the words. A voice can be like a landscape. Nobody we met on our cinematic paths made this more noticeable than Robert Lax. His incomparable serenity hovers over every thought. You can enter this space by listening to him read his poetry, a quarter hour of which is gathered in LAX READINGS.

An avant-garde documentary film on English guitarist, composer and improviser Fred Frith.

From January to November 2004, as a kind of carnet de voyage alongside our other activities, we asked one and the same question of various people we met on our journeys, including friends: "Do you remember a moment in your life when something really changed?" We requested them to tell us a story to illustrate their reply, and we filmed them.

What story is hidden in the stranded suitcase full of pictures, sounds and letters whose origins we do not know? The film is an homage to cinema, a film poem made up of images between dream and reality; a network of sounds, text fragments and voices that leads far out into the world and at the same time close to us. Aren’t we all floating islands?

In May of 1982 Julio Cortázar, the Argentinean writer and his companion in life, Carol Dunlop set out in their VW bus on a journey along the highway from Paris to Marseille that, for each of them, was to be their final one. Twenty-five years later, Océane Madelaine and Jocelyn Bonnerave set out to undertake the journey again.

Wonderland is a joint project by the Parisian band Das Kapital with Edward Perraud on drums, Hasse Poulsen on guitar, and Daniel Erdmann on saxophone and the filmmakers Nicolas Humbert and Martin Otter.

The path to Yusef Lateef was a journey into the unknown. We were aware that he is one of the great maestros of jazz and one of the last of his generation still alive. In an era of black culture that probably found its strongest form of expression in music, he was a contemporary and companion of those musicians who helped to shape and renew jazz: John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Cannonball Adderley. Now, at the age of 84, Yusef Lateef lives withdrawn in his house in the woods somewhere in New England – in a room full of musical instruments. He still plays his saxophone today, as he has done for most of his life. (Humbert & Penzel)

The highway, revisited. Years later. Transformation of a locale. A place of mobility that, in the meantime, has become a place of silence.

Robert Lax (1915-2000) was a poet with a singular vision and style whose quest to live an authentic life as both an artist and a spiritual seeker inspired Thomas Merton, Jack Kerouac, William Maxwell and countless others. Known in the U.S. primarily as Merton’s best friend and in Europe as a daringly original avant-garde poet, Lax lived a life of simplicity, humility and grace that continues to encourage and motivate readers and followers. This film is a portrait of Robert Lax as he was to those who were fortunate to visit him during his thirty years of living on the Greek island of Patmos.

The musicians of the ‚Art Ensemble of Chicago’ have been performing their portrayal of jazz from past and present since 1967, not unlike a journey backwards in time aroused by an ancestral call to the myths of Africa. But what happens before their concerts? NULL SONNE NO POINT is the magnificent chronicle of the preparation for a concert and invites us into the very heart of the music, following the musicians backstage, at their rehearsals and moments of privacy and concentration, seeking the fluctuating emotions before the music begins.

Author and activist Milo Yellow Hair (Oglala Lakota) is one of the most important intellectual voices of the American Indian resistance movement. Born in 1950 and raised on the Pine Ridge Reservation, he has dedicated himself to the struggle for the recognition and survival of indigenous cultures. We spent an afternoon asking him questions on the theme of memory and cultural identity. Memories are not what has passed, but are the cutting edge between past and present. Never before has so much information been saved and forgotten at the same time. What happens when we lose the memory of our heritage? Is it preserved in collective memory and made accessible in the challenges of the future?

A surrealist tribute to The Rolling Stones.

As a child, the poet Thanh Nguyen lost his sight in an American raid. He grew up, married and had a family. When his wife fell ill, he decided to go begging around the country, accompanied by his nine-year-old daughter. Conceived as confession for two voices (father and daughter), torn by shots of absolute clarity, Vang Bong is a journey through darkness.

Filmed in Patmos in May 1999, this is Robert Lax’s last year in Greece, roughly his last year of life. For 21 minutes you see only Lax’s head and his right hand, which holds a wooden staff of sorts (a walking stick or ... a broomstick?!). He wears a navy blue knit hat. The only movement is in his eyes, and ever so slight movements of his head. Lax does not look at the camera, his eyes are mostly downcast, but he is awake and aware, watching and waiting, and you are drawn into his profound stillness. All of those who were able to meet Lax during his lifetime consider it a particular stroke of fortune. They say that from that point on he became part of their bodies and souls, as though they had met a true saint. My Eye Your Eye is like being in the presence of holiness. For 20 minutes. Watching and waiting. I've always wanted to know better what Bob Lax was like - how he was. This film does it.

Wanted! Hanns Eisler is a filmic and musical search for traces; an approach to Eisler's life as a homeless wanderer between worlds and his work, which retains its charisma and inspires subsequent generations of artists to new musical experiments.

Filmmakers Nicolaus Humbert and Werner Penzel examine the nature of nomadic existence in this documentary, from the literal nomads of North Africa to the more metaphorical kind of wanderer, such as American poet and ex-pat Robert Lax. Humbert and Penzel focus especially on the nomad's paradoxical ability to fully inhabit every moment while remaining coolly detached from specific locales and anxious thoughts about the past or future.

A short experiment about the present moment. A hunt for the unique gift of coincidences. A look at filmmaker Nicolas Humbert - with his very own, poetic approach. Refering to his methods, memories and pictures.

Philip, Max, and Julia Rossmann are brothers and sister. Out of their own life, they try to continue childhood bonds. Through their entanglement in a mysterious event, the three are torn apart. For each, a new beginning. The film begins a year later. Quite impulsively, Philip Rossmann leaves his hide-out to go and look for his lost brother. He meets former friends with whose help he tries to reconstruct his brother's trail. Despite the setbacks his research brings, he is able to track down his brother. They meet.

A film that ressembles a dream. Shot over a period of several years, it is composed of fragments of memory and moments of life woven together to create a sequence of microscopic stories. “Vagabonding Images” is a film that plays with the forms of cinematic language inspired by the poetic collage techniques of the French Surrealists and Japanese Haiku poets.

Johann le Guillerm, the tightrope walker who had become one of the main characters in Middle of the Moment, decided to found a new circus and called it “Cirque Ici.” In the fall of 1997, we visited him on the first European tour of his solo circus performance and shot with him for three days and nights.