Cloud Reading Society

The adventure of a film that uses the real as matter, needs to keep an eye on any detail, any sign that would occur in the course that runs from the first take to the last final choice of editing, because each small event, each causal chain or each flashing chance, will determine the form and content of the film which at the beginning was only a possibility, a simple idea: make a film about the origins of jazz using as a backdrop its most important contemporary expression forum.

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.

Burning Bright depicts a unique gathering of musicians from the Swedish contemporary and creative music scene, and their common voyage through a torched winter landscape. Fire! Orchestra is a collective voice in which the vocal chords are plucked individually by the members. The notes, the words, and the images are torn down to be built up again. We exist to be able to enter as if the titles of the praised records spoke to us: first came "Exit", then "Enter". But how far inside can we go before we find ourselves exiting again?

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".

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.

At the dawn of time, explorers set out to examine the world. And even if the geographical limits of our small planet have long since been determined, there are still people who discover the world afresh.

A cinematographic logbook around the mythical island of Alicudi in Sicily.

"We realize History principally as the struggle of social classes and society as the very last cause of all forms of destiny its members can know" - Bertolt Brecht

This episode of the Carnets filmés, shot in Mexico, is largely devoted to Barbara Peón Solis's photographic exhibition, entitled Como Buda te Veras, which was held in Querétaro. Beyond this artistic event, Exposición (Journal du Mexique) is a stroll through Mexico City and an unusual exploration of the Teotihuacan pyramid site.

A cinematographic logbook around the mythical island of Alicudi in Sicily.

A cinematographic logbook around the mythical island of Alicudi in Sicily.

A New World is an inventory of 112 streets, roads and alleys (first part) and 14 squares and squares (second part) of the Bois de Vincennes in Paris.

2006, D8. Colour.Sound. 15 min.