Cinexpérimentaux #11: Voyage dans le cinéma expérimental à Beyrouth - Avec Jaap Pieters au Liban

Marcel Hanoun, one of the most innovative of filmmakers, gives us what he names "a lesson in cinema." Frederique Devaux and Michel Amarger filmed this piece at his country house, composing an abundantly rich portrait. Film clips and sparks of theoretic bravura testify to the feverish creativity and the drunken agitation behind which lurks the ever-composed voice of the filmmaker.

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.

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, 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.

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.

Portrait of experimental filmmaker Martine Rousset.

The intentional ghost image, "mechanic chiseling", was obtained in camera by the effect of voluntary spinning.

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.

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.