Darkness, Darkness, Burning Bright – Prelude

Walking towards the fire. In a ceaseless stream of light, people, landscapes and objects lead us to mysterious regions. French filmmaker Patrick Bokanowski’s work is hard to classify - and all the richer for it. Together with his wife Michèle, whose musique concrète compositions form the basis of the sound design, Bokanowski offers a prolonged, dense and visually visceral experience of the kind that is rare in cinema today. Difficult to define and locate, its strangeness is quite unique.

The sea foams and bubbles. Gray white bleak everywhere. Chasms and mountains. Water... only water! And nothing to absorb it all! Other shattering shock. Brief look round of the chief. The needle progresses unperturbed. First the sonar! Water Diving and silver in the depths, lift up to the light and ice.

For the cold winter, the pouring rain, the short wavy, the violent storm, the early frost or something like that, if the fall of the leaves is late, if the smoke rises straight, if it falls, if the leaves swirling or if the dust makes the vortex, if the frogs repeated to the swamps their monotonous complaint, and when the prevailing winds become favorable.

Handmade and uniquely personal, this 16mm film in two parts explores a rural landscape with mythical connotations. First part: prelude. “Darkness, darkness, burning bright In the forests of the night. Vast flowered paths, fresh branches, Groves full of perfumes, birds and whispers, Site often seen again, and always contemplated....” Second part: oraison. “Darkness, darkness, burning bright In the forests of the night And the mad impulse of this distraught soul, And that had, the forehead circled in copper, under the moon….”

Handmade and unique personal 16mm film in two parts. “Darkness, darkness, burning bright In the forests of the night And the mad impulse of this distraught soul, And that had, the forehead circled in copper, under the moon.”

A new leaf. In like a lion, out like a lamb. Rain or shine. The calm before the storm. Mad as a March hare. Out to pasture. Once in a blue moon. April showers, May flowers. Where the wind blows. The wolf at the door. To each his own.

We play together because we are moved by objects that spin: records, film reels, disco balls… We play together because we appreciate – as one might appreciate a distance – the resemblances in what transpires from their whirling. We play together because “where there’s a will, there’s a way” with all this bric-a-brac. And we confirm what intuition has always suggested to us: the co-existence of light, shadow, sound, and silence, the collision of photons with particles of sound, evocation, contradiction, anecdote, and counterpoint. We play together because we love working in the studio, challenges, paying attention to detail or to the nuances of a sound mix, ruptures, abruptnesses, and untimely idlenesses…

The do-it-yourself film lab Atelier MTK in Grenoble, France is the cradle of the performance group Metamkine, but also for instance of Lafoxe. Etienne Caire and Gaëlle Rouard are the driving forces behind the lab and have developed a 16mm performance with its very own signature. The basic material for Lafoxe came from old Hollywood films. After extensive processing in the lab, these bits and pieces are put on the silver screen again using several film projectors at once. The result is a dynamic form of widescreen, which they have dubbed hyperscope. The sound is a live mix of the original optical soundtracks.

It's not so much a performance as it is a film interpreted live.

Film portrait of dutch director Karel Doing

Brave riders, come forth, you whose eyes shine, to hear a story once more. We see stars there that replace their beautiful deer with boars. But love holds many mysteries, there are those who sometimes kiss beautiful deer in the shadows by the thousands.