Winter Journey

"It's in the idea of movement where, for me, something essential comes together/ combines-- Seven short poems write to each other in images, fleeting visions of China glimpsed through sights, through sounds, always moving." -Robert Cahen.

Temporary landscape; visual and sonic messages; blended; the city. Part of the "New Spaces" project, the film is an exploration of the landscapes and sounds of Hong Kong, seeking its identity between the old China and the new.

The concept of "things half seen" determined the meaning of this film. Hidden scenes, barely revealed, follow one another as living and significant views affecting our wish to see and understand what we see only as glimpses, but might see in its totality. Made as a video-short principally through a succession of quick sequences, "Glimpses" shows the maintenance of mystery between two "masked" people in a world where the curtains remain closed.

A film by Robert Cahen and John Borst. A woman passes through Hong Kong after dark.

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 light creates the motion. The film uses black and white as a way to to reveal things. Something is happening here linking death, love and pleasure. Appearance, disappearance, the rhythm of breathing revealing the passing of time both binds and releases our feelings.

Twins still in their amniotic fluid announce our human condition, our compulsion to walk, move forward, run. When everything moves, we go through the forest of emotions in a dreamlike way. But it is thanks to water and its light reflections, to its transforming power that the infinite “Kosmos” plays with our uncertainty.

In this vivid transposition of contemporary music for television, Cahen "responds" to the complex musical transitions of Répons, a work by French composer Pierre Boulez. Performed by the Ensemble InterContemporain and conducted by Boulez, the intricate Répons was designed for an ensemble of twenty-four musicians, six soloists and a "real-time" digital processor. In Cahen's re-composed interpretation, he responds with visual and temporal transformations, "opening" the images in space and time and applying electronic techniques to engulf the instrumentalists in ocean, sky, and trees. Mirage-like superimpositions, temporal shifts, mirroring effects and de-synchronization result in a rhythmic confluence of the illusory and the real. Immersing the viewer in image and sound, Cahen mirrors the transformative process of Boulez's music.

About “Four Doors” André Bon writes : these doors open onto four soundscapes which express in the order : tension, relaxation, expectation, ecstasy. We say : Sign. Symphonic breathing in four movements where music and sensuality of the images are offered in counterpoint, by subtle shifts. Small story of an encounter to decipher.

L'Eclipse, is composed as a visual little poem using light, colour, rhythm, to present a universe that is half celestial, half cerebral, in which graphic grids play with disappearing and setting suns. Robert Cahen creates effects of fire, clouds, steam, that contrast with the regular and geometric structure of the image.

Short film.

The images of this short film are linked to the concrete music by Michel Chion, and let the monologue of Saint Antoine (Pierre Schaeffer's voice) unfold and offer itself completely. The imagery, presented in parallel pictures, is intended to be earthy and close to nature, rediscovering, when necessary, the material which is offered in a metaphor surrounded by mists. At the sound of the gunshot, concrete in the music, occurs this break in the discourse, and the image, like this gunshot, finds the Asian connotation of death. And the dream raises the human form, then a face which offers itself before disappearing in the tumults of an imaginary sea. The earth seen from the sky then the sky itself take us very far (Robert Cahen)

It was in 1973 that this film, the first film shot in Super 8 mm with magnetic sound, was broadcast on television. The Carnival of Basel is famous for the music of its fife-and-drum military bands. The imaginary quality of the carnival comes face to face with musique concrète.