Artaud and the Tarahumaras

Los Pascoleros - Tarahumaras 85

This film was shot during Easter 1985. It shows the preparation and staging of the Passion in the village of Norogachic, Mexico. The initiation rites of two Pascoleros, filmed for the first time, form the center of this document.

Life Lesson

To attain knowledge, man and woman had to be willing to give up their innocence," says Boris Lehman. Life Lesson is a poetic and philosophic reflection on the theme of paradise lost. Some fifty persons illustrate the planet's convulsions and the world's vacillations. Trying to communicate, to commune with the invisible, they cry out, sing out, give out messages, each in their own way, in their own state of solitude. These are like multiple echoes that resemble waves in the water or stars in the sky. " Behind these images and sounds that have been stifled by today's society, Lehman hunts for noises, cries, songs, messages that go astray. He says that if we look at the invisible we may hear the words. He invites us to look beyond the appearances of social life and to vibrate in tune with life's polyphony that is all around us."

The Dead Tree

The veneer of the story is a tale of chance love: two French expatriates strike up a chance romance when they meet on a ship headed back to South America.

Rupture

Joa (Bulle Ogier), an archaeologist from Mexico, comes to Paris in search of her sister Anna (Mireille Perrier), of whom she is suddenly without news. Anna, a theater actress, was in the title role in Sade's "Justine" when she disappeared. The investigation leading Joa to the people who have known her sister, turns into an initiatory quest. Her journey, her stroll through a subterranean marginal Paris, leads also to the emergence of a new woman.

Gradiva: Esquisse I

The movie shows a smattering of images from the story of Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva. The subject is sublimated desire.

Cinématon

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.

Julien

An intimate exploration of Raymonde Carasco’s father.

Ciguri - Tarahumaras 99 - Le dernier chaman

Rites of winter, rites of peyote. A creative documentary based on texts by Antonin Artaud read by Jean Rouch, and the words of the last shaman’s peyote, translated by Raymonde Carasco.

Ciguri – Tarahumaras 98 - La Danse Du Peyotl

A documentary cycle involving the Rarámuri or Tarahumara people of Northern Mexico. This film addresses rites of winter as well as peyote and bakaka rites. Its commentary, read by Raymonde Carasco and Jean Rouch, is drawn from texts by Antonin Artaud.

Le Contrebandier des profondeurs

Divisadero 77 (Gradiva - Western)

By combining a journey to the locations for Eisenstein’s unfinished opus Que Viva Mexico! with images of an Indian girl walking, Carasco has created a cinematic topos across multiple historical eras. We see figures walking, marching, in motion, as we set out on the trail of a film, and of the Tarahumara – those who run fast.

Dorothy Mills

When a gloomy, God-fearing island community is rocked by the assault of an infant, a psychiatrist is called in to examine Dorothy Mills, the teenager accused of the crime. Despite the villagers' hostility to her inquiry, she soon comes to suspect that Dorothy suffers from multiple personality disorder...

Incendiary

A woman's life is torn apart when her husband and infant son are killed in a suicide bombing at a soccer match.

While She Was Out

Della Myers, a suburban housewife, lives with her twin children and her abusive husband, Kenneth. On Christmas Eve, she drives to the local mall to buy gift-wrap. In the jam-packed parking lot, she notices an old car taking up two spaces and decides to leave a note on the windshield calling them out. After the mall closes, her car is blocked by the old car and she's threatened by four thugs. She escapes in her vehicle, but they drive after her. She crashes at a dead end construction site at the edge of a forest. What unfolds in the desolate woods is Della's lone fight for survival against a gang of angry young men with murderous intent.