The Luminous Undergrowth

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.

A film of lyric abstration, with spirituality as its subject matter...

"It's a poetic camera through Super 8 film which plays of the electric guitar in an increased vision of daydream! But in fact this is my very last Super 8 film cartridge (Fuji Velvia 100 daylight) realized this summer, then projected on the wall of my room, and Re-filmed with stolen by means of a smartphone for a division in public on line on vimeo! The cords of the electric guitar which break time with other, or then the guitar's mediators pulverized to replace are to me much less expensive than filming into Super 8 nowadays…" —Dominik Lange

"A film completed as part of the hands-on workshop Pages Arrachées proposed by the cinematographic collective L'Etna. A book without a cover. You don't know the title nor the author. Tear out a page. Look at it, read it. Thread up a super-8 cartridge. Film these 3 minutes. Look for shots. Those that are to be found in the text and those that are not there. Those in front of you that bring out the words that still have a hold over you. Text fragment read and treated by Philippe Vernier." —Dominik Lange

A modest collage of images recorded while strolling through Paris...

This is the story of a trip through the countryside, cutting through fields, beyond the horizon of the landscape in search of a lost spirituality.

A defective Ricoh camera brings out luminous traces on images shot in Ektachrome. The japanese sherry trees in blossom, at the Jardin des Plantes, next to the film-makers flat.

Natural devices are used directly during the shooting process to transform the image with the help of moving mirrors, animated by the surface of water waves and other tremblings on lake surfaces, as well as other bodies of water in the natural space of the Paris urban area.

You are, no doubt, already familiar with such literary quotations as "In search of lost time" (A la recherche du temps perdu) or "Those living pillars which gaze at us", as per Napoleon Bonaparte, when faced with the famous pyramids of Egypt?

"For best viewing, use red cyan anaglyphic 3D glasses, and view from three to four feet from your monitor. You can therefore see the amazing inverted 3D daydream!" —Dominik Lange

This film illustrates a recurring theme in the work of Dominik Lange: the opposition of nature and city. The film explores various different aesthetic options. Lange begins by filming a bare tree, magnifying it and giving it the plastic seductivity of a watercolour in movement. The shots of the tree, either gently caressed by the artist's camera or exploding in a multitude of trembling and scratched forms, alternate with a series of shots of depressing new public-housing tower blocks. Lang revitalizes these buildings by clustering them together and/or blurring their contours. At a certain point, a building site appears; we see the buildings under construction, with construction workers busy at their task. Were these shots filmed later, or did the film-maker choose to show them later? It doesn't really matter; the alchemical phenomenon which mutates vegetation (nature) into the depressing uniformity of tower blocks is conveyed with sensitivity.

"...Chrysalides use[s] the movie camera as a still camera, flickering between different stills of natural forms, proving once again that movement is not created in the film but in the brain.” (Pip Chodorov, 2002)

I wanted to reach the farthest point of my interior landscape, but I have never been able to reach the same place twice! Was it some kind of nightmare, or some unexpected spiritual lightning? Now I feel like a stranger in a foreign world, who would like to find some of this light ...

"This is Super 8 stereoscopic cinema finally projected in my living room! For best viewing,use red cyan anaglyphic 3D glasses, and view from three to four feet from your monitor. It's finally operational, but after one sleepless night supplements last to finalize the last details adjustments of projection at home… The filtering of images proposed here is red/cyan (red on the left), with horizontal parallax a little corrected at the movie screening, which results in a significant loss of the useful surface area projected into relief on the edges of the pictures, only the center of the screen was thus really projected here in red/cyan anaglyph…" —Dominik Lange

The twilight and half-closed vision of the blinding bursts barely reveals fleeting and luminous unexpected phosphorescences, through and through the scenery, like so many flashes of understanding, promises of famous colors to come...