Transfiguration

Aloual, the black pearl leads an initiatory journey which is a quest for the part of mystery and the wild side that lays deep inside each of us.

The paths of eight characters brush against one another, collide, avoid one another, attract one another or clash in the texture of a Super 8 ballet film. Climax attemps to transalte the sensation of a nightmare which, by nature evades reality, fiction and even memory to engrave syncopated, brief, distorded, repetitive and obsessive pictures in our brains. These pictures are those of a murder fantasy.

The film appears like a ritual with splendids and crypteds psalms. The Great Master of Order (Marcel Mazé, new fetish actor after Aloual) seduces the young male prey with a running cinema projector which carves Murnau's Nosferatu extracts on their bodies. Metamorphosis, rituals passages, Eros and Thanotos, illusion and reality, film into the film are the themes and images in perpetual osmosis in this Stéphane Marti's opus.

A barocco environment inspired by shared desires and fantasy (that led to the co-writing of Corptrass, a scenario by Michel Journiac and Stephane Marti in 1980) shelters fragments of the story, passion and doubts of the master of Corporal Art.

Michel Journiac's actions (1935-1995) are unique works and have never been repeated (except for the first, Mass for a body, 1969). Only photographs, films or videos testify to their existence.

Filmmaker and teacher, Stéphane Marti has been researching experimental cinema as an art form liberated of aesthetic codes and the economics of big budget cinema. His work is primarily focused on the themes of the sacred and the human body. An avid supporter of the Super-8 format, he has been fighting for its merits as a tool. He has used this format film after film and has been sharing his experiences with new filmmakers during his workshops at the Sorbonne’s College of the Arts (Paris I).

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.

Between music and silence, a pale boy handsome as a statue by Canova and a flamboyant black boy in a ritual photographed by Marcel Mazé. With the presence of a Michel Journiac's self-portrait sculpture, votive offerings of sacred skulls and crucifixes, dried flowers, Monique Delvincourt fragmented mirrors, Louboutin heels, images of the assoluta Diva and a sound re-articulation of Gounod's Faust by Berndt Deprez.

An avant-garde short film.

Ritual of seduction led by Aloual, principal actant of the filmmaker's first films. This ritual, carried by the rock energy of the divine Lou Reed, accelerates in a frenzied gesture that develops the erotic imagination... Ambiguity of the male nature... gender trouble... This ritual of seduction open to erotics dreams...

Around three boys accomplices to playful and shy grace, Stéphane Marti inaugurates his cinematographic writing.

Halleluia : one of the most beautiful prayers in the world, a magnificent and distributing piece from Leonard Cohen, wavering between the sacred and the profane, suggesting pain, pleasure, lust, and lost physical love ; a mournful eroticism chanted with sensuality and formidable grace by Jeff Buckley, an inspired performer/angel. Hence my deep desire to project my own ritual of images on its spellbinding lyrics. S.M

The Devil's beauty is first a garden lived by fettereds statues, bodies tensed between sensuality, damnation and sacred. The film seduce by a brillant camera editing as a clear music. In a singular rhythm, images fall down as flights of quavers before a short lull, a shot, like a note...

Two merry partners, fleshy roses and an improvised dance celebrate this glamrock jewel that glorifies the ambiguity of desire.

A single-screen version of the Portraits / Mirrors multi-projection. Featuring portraits of: Aloual, Gaël Badaud, Raphaël Bassan, Yann Beauvais, Jean-Michel Bouhours, Gérard Courant, Berndt Deprez, Bertrand Gadenne, Mythia Kolésar, Christian Lebrat, Stéphane Marti, Pascal Martin, Michel Nedjar, Dominique Noguez, Vivian Ostrovsky, Bernard Roué, Martine Rousset, Alain Sayag, Unglee, and Catherine Zbinden.

Long slides of images and sounds reveal the subtle mysteries of a forgotten Eros embodied by Aloual, the fetish actor. A captivating profane ceremony where drawings, photos, objects, assemblages, paintings and fragments of films interpenetrate in strange hybridizations. Slides between digital and film that also cross the territories of Thanatos to resurface in the energy of a wild and joyful dance.