Cinexpérimentaux #6: Marcel Hanoun, A Lesson in Cinema

1999, 16mm, 01'30", color, silent, France

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.

K3 (Les Femmes) is dedicated to the Kabili women of North Africa. The artist superimposes images and sounds to highlight the difficulty these women face in proclaiming their identity. The film projects activities of Kabili women which usually include the raising of children, the family, and the household. Erased from the exterior society, their marginalisation is depicted through the fading in and out of images and sounds. However, within their own private spaces, they remain loyal, they sing, dance, and resist a society that does not take into account their full value.

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.

Cinexpérimentaux is a series of documentaries on experimental filmmakers, produced and directed by Michel Amarger and Frédérique Devaux. N°8 is dedicated to the most important European cooperative Light Cone created in 1982 in Paris.

Portrait of experimental filmmaker Nicolas Rey.

Stephen Dwoskin was born in New York in 1939 and began making independent shorts there in 1961. In 1964 he followed his research work to London where he settled and participated in the founding of the London Filmmaker’s Co-op. His experimental films, for which he himself does the camera work, play with ideas of desire, sexual and mental solitude and the passage of time. In his films he also explores representation in cinema, performances, personal impressions and his own physical handicap which has been a source of inspiration for him throughout his career. His sensitive and emancipating works have been the subject of various international presentations.

Portrait of experimental filmmaker Martine Rousset.

Rose Lowder is an artisan of cinema. Her 16mm camera takes the place of a loom for the weaving of images. She has consecrated her life to these tapestries, these embroideries whose motifs have for many years come from nature, in a state of incessant becoming. Like her elders, the Impressionist painters, she renders her bouquets stroke by stroke, image by image, color after color, to give life to her pointillist compositions in motion.

Stéphane Marti is a teacher and film-maker who, since 1976, has been expounding the plasticity of experimental cinema, freeing it from the dominant codes of narrative cinema. An avid defender of Super-8mm film (which he has been using for 30 years), he has fought for the acknowledgement of its excellence as a film-making tool. His work, which screens in festivals and at international events, has been the subject of numerous interviews and articles. Flamboyant, baroque and sensual, his work revolves primarily around the question of the body and the sacred.

Portrait, alternating interviews and extracted from Pip Chodorov's films who evokes its conception of the experimental movies, the links of some of his films with photography. Their character, sometimes improvised, sometimes composed. He’s and editor's activities of videocassettes Re: Voir.

While filming a portrait of Dutch filmmaker Jaap Pieters, he evoked memories of a Lebanese friend who had disappeared, and his desire to trace his footsteps / to track him down. This project matched our own desire to learn about the state of Lebanese cinema today. We offered Jaap Pieters to travel together to Lebanon to seek out filmmakers doing research on the moving image. We met Mahmoud Hojeij, Nadim Tabet, Ghassan Salhab, Nesrine Khodr and Lamia Joreige.

Christophe Karabache is an independent French-Lebanese filmmaker born in Beirut in 1979. In 2000, he began exploring various film formats at l'Etna, an alternative workshop in Paris. He shifts between documentary and fiction formats, bringing to mind the wounds of Lebanese society, displaced beings, the fragmentation of identity. Pulsating scenes and jolting cuts demonstrate his desire to destroy cliches. The shock of the imagery in his feature-length films, made after 2010, bears witness to a penetrating critical eye on Lebanon's cultural shifts and the rupture of meaning.

Vivian Ostrovsky is a nomad film-maker, born in New York. Student in Brazil then in Paris, which takes its camera of continent in continent since 1980. Her work, in the border of the documentary and the experimental, touches the filmed journals and is interested in the individuals rather than in the masses, in the physical language, in the unusual of the situations and in the sensible editing of the images and the sounds.

From one film to another, it's true that I often use the same images, to remind people, to create a universe, to show that my work basically constitutes a single work. I can also, like here, deepen a procedure used much earlier, in this case in Un film brûlé (1984). I had torn and shifted the images relative to each other (thus creating a long crack) which I had then not been able to shoot, the film being limited to a soundtrack ever since. Here, it is a question of creating in all possible ways holes and ellipses of images then of stitching these views together in an aesthetic mode in a joyous end-of-the-century apocalypse, of positives, negatives, 16mm, Super- 8, 8mm, black and white, color, enhanced, faded, but still found footage...