Archives mensuelles : mars 2014

We’ve Got the Red Blues

« In 1991, beauvais completed an artistically very successful diarist film on the Soviet union, We’ve Got the Red Blues, which mixes travelling footage shot on a trip to Moscow and Riga In October 1990 with repeating visual quotations from Eisenstein’sOctober and Dziga Vertov’ The Man with a Movie Camera. » Lawrence MacDonald.

Intermittent music from Olivier Messian Quatuor pour la fin du temps.

Son : Quatuor pour la fin du temps d’Olivier Messiaen

« Un voyage à Riga et à Moscou à l’automne 1990. Confrontation entre la réalité des lieux et une mémoire cinématographique de certains de ces mêmes lieux.

Glissements d’images ouvrant certains abîmes mineurs.

« We’ve Got the Red Blues est le film que beauvais a rapporté d’un voyage à travers l’ex-URSS, en compagnie de Vivian Ostrovsky, dans les années qui ont immédiatement suivi la chute du mur. À Riga puis à Moscou, sa caméra a été témoin de la mutation en cours (déboulonnage des statues, splendeur retrouvée des églises orthodoxes) et des prémices de décomposition sociale; la vision apocalyptique d’un pays dominé par la misère humaine et l’architecture stalinienne est renforcée par le Quatuor pour la fin du temps d’Olivier Messiaen. yann beauvais avait filmé les jardins de Tivoli en se référant au film de Kenneth Anger : Tivoli vu par beauvais avait des airs d’Eaux d’artifice revu par beauvais. We’ve Got the Red Blues s’appuie sur un mode référentiel identique en citant Vertov et Eisenstein. yann beauvais intègre dans le cours de son montage des images d’Octobre (1927) et de L’Homme à la caméra (1929), utilisant le contraste dramatique provoqué par le passage du temps. L’utopie et l’enthousiasme d’une génération d’artistes convaincus d’édifier l’art d’une société nouvelle face à la déconvenue de notre époque, l’histoire en marche face à la fin de l’histoire, l’espérance face à la désillusion.
Dans We’ve Got the Red Blues, beauvais joue de la conflagration d’images fortement connotées pour rendre compte, sans parole, de sa vision du monde. Il réussit le projet imaginé il y a vingt-cinq ans de développer un langage cinématographique grandiose, sans pour autant négliger une implication personnelle et permanente dans la condition humaine contemporaine. » Jean Michel Bouhours

SID A IDS

The appearance of Aids unleashed media hysteria in favor of a rapid return of a moral order.Faced with this situation of denunciation, victimization and discrimination against people living with Aids, this film, using a specific visual form, attempts to articulate a condemnation of the use which is made of the illness, the form is a « cine-tract ». The film reveals itself through its oration, it is in fact a film of words.

The use of text allows a distanciation in relation to the effects being used, these are reintroduced by the appearance and treatment of the words which condition the reading of the film, here is the violence of the film which literally partners the act denunciation.
A critique of the arguments and images in other words of the consummation of the words which surround Aids. SID A IDS primarily investigates the reaction to the illness in the context of a French vantage point. The film attempts to favourise an emerging reflection on Aids while remaining within the practice of experimental cinema.

About AIDS, see Act Up

L’apparition du Sida a déclenché une hystérie médiatique à la faveur d’un retour à l’ordre moral effréné. Face à la dénonciation, victimisation et discrimination des malades, ce film tente sous la forme du tract cinématographique d’articuler une dénonciation de l’usage qui est fait de la maladie selon une forme visuelle particulière. Le film se met en scène par son discours ; il s’agit en effet d’un film de mots. L’utilisation d’un texte permet d’instaurer une distance par rapport aux affects en jeux, mais ceux-ci seront réintroduits par l’apparition et le traitement des mots qui conditionnent la lecture du film ; d’où la violence visuelle du film qui accompagne littéralement la dénonciation. Une critique du discours et des images, en un mot de la production et consommation des mots autour du Sida. SID A IDS interroge principalement la réponse à la maladie telle qu’elle a été faite en France. Le film tente de favoriser l’émergence d’une réflexion par rapport au Sida sans mettre hors jeu une pratique cinématographique expérimentale. Film réalisé dans le cadre de SI FILM DA.

Spetsai

Un prétexte : le journal filmé d’un séjour dans une île grecque en janvier dernier. Originellement tourné en Super-8, puis gonflé en 16 mm , le film a subi une transformation supplémentaire après le montage, par l’adjonction de texte.

Le texte permet à la fois la suspension du déroulement en ce qu’il fait passer l’image au second plan mais aussi en ce qu’il lui confère une signification autre. Jeu de texte et de l’image qui permet, à partir d’éléments de journaux, d’aborder d’autres domaines ainsi que pouvait l’esquisser à sa manière Divers-épars.

« Avec Spetsai, beauvais se défausse de l’insolente beauté des lieux de villégiature filmés, en incrustant dans les images un texte extrait de Commentaires sur la société du spectacle de Guy Debord. Au caractère dionysiaque des paysages méditerranéens répond la gravité du texte de Debord sur la radioactivité et la politique du secret nucléaire des États. N’est-ce pas notre propre schizophrénie existentielle que le film dévoile ici ? Les dangers quotidiens et permanents, les malheurs de l’humanité, les holocaustes, massacres, que nous délivrent quotidiennement les media ne nous empêchent pas de continuer à vaquer à nos occupations comme si de rien n’était. C’est bien ce paradoxe terrible de l’être humain, révélé avec acuité par la société contemporaine, que yann beauvais nous « jette à la figure ». La façon dont le texte apparaît à l’image n’est pas neutre : présenté deux lignes par deux lignes, il est tributaire pour sa lecture du montage du film. Son indépendance par rapport à l’image place le spectateur dans une situation qui diffère radicalement des conditions de lecture textuelle d’un film narratif sous-titré. Le débit des images prédétermine le rythme d’une lecture qui ne peut être que mnémonique, selon un ordre immuable : 1. lecture du texte / 2. mémorisation du texte / 3. lecture des images /4. synthèse des deux et ainsi de suite. Le montage cinématographique impose son propre mode de lecture du « message »; cependant le contenu du texte impose à son tour un ordre des choix, des tris, des analyses des constituants cinématographiques. Le fil d’un texte visionnaire et terriblement actuel a valeur d’antidote à une dérive esthétisante que le cinéaste refuse; il s’impose comme préalable à une contemplation des images qui ne peut être suffisante. » Jean Michel Bouhours

At first a diary film of a sojourn on a Greek island last January. Originally filmed the Super 8, then blown up to 16mm, the film has undergone a supplementary transformation, after editing, by the joining of a text. The text permits a suspension to the film unfolding, in that it makes the image pass into the background while also giving it, the image, another signification. Play upon text and image which enables, starting the elements of a diary, souvenir, an approach into other areas, just as Divers Epars, sketched in its own way another approach. yann beauvais

« Cheap lyricism! Perverted poetics! « Just pretty stuff » (As if something this viscerally sensual could ever be mere prettiness!) Subvert the hackmeister and his big chop, slash’n’burn wish. In unison, loudly: Pleasure isn’t necessarily mere frivolousness, and, anyhow, the occasional frill isn’t just a flirt! This too, elicits an awed-ah response: SPRING SPETSAI BUDS SMELL SWEET ha! ha! TIPTOE THROUGH THE RADIOACTIVE LANGUAGE, BUSTER. No, pleasure isn’t just frivolous. (squirm and writhe) Glerps. Get it: mental meddling can also be tinkling with the erogenous zones. Shall I say: beings fully engaged in the act of watching. The brain operates the heart pumps the blood to the brain, interconnected, as are these aspects – emotional/intimate, cerebral/theoretical – facets of a celluloid gem, emitting and refracting its colour, light, sense and time beyond the screen.
Adamant bully dad Dad? He threatens, but fortunately doesn’t slice out. Or just that which interferes with the rhythm; he’s got a keen ear for that. A slice can be a splice can be the pinch of spice. » Sandra Reid

» Emerging from the blue into sharp dappling strokes; waves. The edge od the winter sea. An orange in a tree, in January, fruit shuddering forth from a green and blue shot haze, taking focus but only just, as if suddenly round and dazzling with sunlight -; a small sun hung in the trees and then gone, quickly a shiver becoming part of the smudge stutter of images as they turn from land to sea lapping close, rocks close, stone. Textures washed sharp, tense. A clarity of colour blurring and the judder jump movement; the green slide focussing out of a leaf, near to its surface making the leaf appear from a chamber of light, then a branch and branching, a tree and this thicket of green a filter for the wall which hovers behind it, moving through in a white blaze and further along the branch, close again, the ball of copper shimmering from its dozing shade takes shape in a brief orb of vibrant orange. The winter crisp light and landscape of a voyage on an island, Spetsai. Tripping on the diary journey ; a man and a donkey on a stony path, hot heads of flowers, the glimpsing of water and air so pure. Over the sky slung water pieces of cloud in the metallic titles of waves, dipping across and down, plunge the hand in a dive rippling the mirror of the sea floor deeper below, sky into ocean. POLLUTION. Hangs the word over the luscious lapse of holiday just at the point of succombing to the sway of island, view out from land, tumbling of flowers in a lilt to, hills tilting to water. NUCLEAR, when up-to-the-hilt-secure in the resplendent eternal thrill of nature, basking on the rhythm POLLUTION (by any other name would smell as sweet). Get your hand out of the water. Juxtaposition of language insidiously infecting the image, cutting across them and with its static linear horizon blocking any attempt to hook on the colour and movement. Lustre of words enforced and assured by sound printing firmly on the screen, this site the beginnings of western thinking and just around the corner the bleach of the black industry (whitened when they can from the waste). Beach POLLUTION on the holiday idyll still travelling like a backdrop, swung from the high balm of ocean now absorbing words, words. End. Go now it blows. The images holding a different reading, interprete those postcards; having a lovely time, so beautiful, wish…pleasure threatened and not only pleasure. Get there now but too late, SPECTACLE to look at but looking means you’re a part of it, water in high and low tide, corruption inlaid DISTORTION rendering passive, how fantastic when it blows except you’ll blow with it. Lovely to look at, lovely to behold (forgetting the sewage outfall) thought leading (forgetting everything) NUCLEAR SPECTACLE. SUGAR COATED; much sweet bribes, look, CATASTROPHE. »
Sandra Reid 1989

entre-deux-mondes

Fr, En, Pt

existe en version française, English version, Versão Português https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t54Skf2z-GY&feature=youtu.be

Une promenade dans les jardins de Versailles en décembre 83 filmé en super 8.
printemps 2010 une réappropriation et un détournement du film d’origine. L’espace du jardin s’est transformé, le document d’origine se déploie autrement, faisant surgir d’autres plans, d’autres horizons et des modalités de pouvoirs laissés de côté au profit d’une contemplation esthétique.

A trip to the Versailles garden in the winter of 83.
In 2010 I rework that super 8 original footage in order to bring other meaning to this landscape. The alteration of this footage through color mixing and speed, as much as the adding of a short text convey other meanings such as power codification that are not yet visible when one takes for granted a magnify shaped landscape.

Uma viagem para o Jardim de Versalhes, no inverno de 83. Em 2010 eu re-trabalho as imagens originais em super-8 a fim de trazer outro significado a esta paisagem. A alteração deste material através da mistura de cores e velocidades, tanto como a adição de um pequeno texto, transmite outros significados, tais como a codificação de poder, que ainda não são visíveis quando um toma como dado a paisagem magnificamente formada.

meeting paul in buffalo

Une brève visite à Buffalo à l’occasion d’une projection de mes films invité par Paul SHARITS. quelques fragments de super 8 tournés en 1983.

A short trip to buffalo in order to show some of my works, invited by Paul SHARITS in 1983. Super 8 footage.

Luchando

A la suite d’un voyage, le film interroge l’histoire de Cuba à travers les rapports que nous entretenons avec les différents mythes de quant à la révolution cubaine…
Les questions de l’homosexualité et du racisme permettent d’investir ces tensions. Recyclage et appropriation de documents visuels de toutes provenances : cinéma de propagande nord américain, cubain, soviétique, mais aussi documents d’actualité (historique et contemporain, films de fiction et documentaires, superposés à des séquences réalisées au portable. Le travail sonore croise des sons originaux et prélevés ainsi que différents discours de Fidel Castro… et en voix off une réflexion sur la question du racisme par un intellectuel dissident.

Tissage polyphonique à propos de Cuba.

tu, sempre #11

Fr, En, Pt

Reprenant et poursuivant le versions antérieures de Tu, sempre cette nouvelle version en portugais interroge plus particulièrement les questions du VIH et du Sida au Brésil.

La bande sonore est un collage de deux morceaux d’Ultra-Red.

A new version of Tu, sempre a work in continuous progress. This short film is in Portuguese and deals mostly about HIV and Aids in Brasil.
The soundtrack is a collage of two pieces by Ultra-Red

Uma nova versão do filme Tu, sempre, um trabalho em progresso. Este curta é em português, e concentra-se sobre AIDS e HIV no Brasil. O som é um colagem a partir de doas peças de Ultra-Red.

Artificial Poetic

Un hommage à Hollis Frampton. À partir du livre de photographies Poetic Justice une plaisanterie cinématographique.

Réalisé à l’occasion de l’exposition Book machine dans le cadre du nouveau festival centre georges pompidou 2013.

https://vimeo.com/119705872

Ken Jacobs Film – As a Phantom Image (Eng)

published in 1994 for the Ken Jacobs retrospective at the American Center in Paris and in the Oberhausen catalogue (42ème international – short film festival, 1996) for the Ken Jacobs presentation : « Das Kino Als Geisterbild ».

Ken Jacobs is one of the most important figures in American experimental film. For more than 35 years, he has questioned the nature of moving pictures in a variety of approaches. Whatever the genre – film diary, analytical film, « personals film », picaresque film, 3D performance – he is always interested in film as a process of recording and reconstituting (in the projection) an event or a more or less open narrative. The narrative structure is never absent on Ken Jacobs’s films, although some of his works break up the classic form of representation and its narrative traditions. Film replays in the present a time long gone, another life. Cinema as an enterprise producing phantoms and ghosts whose visual performances constitutes its magnificent outcome. A work on the ephemeral and the fragility of the filmic illusion, revealed by Jacob’s installations.

Since his early films, which celebrates a way of living, long gone since, as with Orchard Street or Little Stabs at happiness, 50’s bohemian life in New York city, to the latest performances of electrical shadows, Ken Jacobs has always been the outsider within the experimental film scene. H has always claimed and promoted a free cinema, a cinema close to home movies as those made about Flo’s family for Urban Peasants, and which share the same feeling as some of Ron Rice and Jack Smith. Many of his early works have been done with Jack Smith (even if some times they were done with some disagreement). Ken Jacob’s film mixes styles which until then dispersed, the use of found footage, authorize him to question the narrative in Doctor’s Dream, investigate the notion of authenticity with Perfect Film, out-takes from a film dealing with Malcolm X assassination. With Tom, Tom The Piper ’s Son, themes and variations transformed the narratives codes from a recycle so called primitive film. This recycling of footage is also very active within the performance, a French porno film of the 20’s is used withXCXHXEXRXRXIXEXSX, while Making Light of History : The Philippines Adventureused newsreel. Within the 3D film the history of cinema is present ; as a reference or as a quotation, Lumière’s film within Opening the Nineteenth Century : 1896, Buster Keaton with Keaton’s Cops.

He works by approaching sounds and music as well as recycled and redirected images. This recycling does not stop at his own films which are never completely finish, always work in progress. The soundtrack of Blonde Cobra uses a radio transmission which punctures the stretches of the black silence, is inserted between the sequences in order to oppose the present and the vision of scenes that took elsewhere, long ago. The invasion of parasites into the ghosts of a story that is still to come for the audience of the presence. The characters of the picaresque films are put into question, opened for discussion by the scenes that interrupt the plot, as in Star Spangled to death and The Sky Socialist. His work his always on the periphery, marginal. In With Tom, Tom The Piper ’s Son, it is the rereading of the story, its abstraction, that makes us aware of the details of the images we have missed. Likewise in Perfect Film, where none of the found footage film was modified. By this process of appropriation and naming, Ken Jacobs forces us to exercise a critical view. Ken Jacob always tries to break our seeing habits to make us aware of all that can be contained by in the filmed image. The representation is haunted by a multitude of events we don’t know how to perceive. Only the filmmaker’s insistence – as well as the spectator’s- makes them visible. The ghost images recover shape for all who knows how to take time to look at them.

CHAUSSE-TRAPPE (THE TRAP) (Eng)

in Undercut n°16, London 1986

Art is

A screen, an image. The image on the screen is not the film frame. A distinct distance separates them. Our screen, our image is thus contained. But the container tends to disappear in favour of the contained. This effacement is magnified at the centre of the screen, where events and action are distributed, divided. To such an extent that a flicker film reveals the pulsating mechanism which unevenly distributes light across the surface of the screen, dividing in four zones. In the centre is a dead zone, neutral, which seems to allow for the eruption of luminous events. This flow of luminous energy between the four quarter eclipses, by its very rotation, the edges of the image. The edges disappear in favour of this intense flow. The frame becomes a dead zone of representation. This zone shines dumbly, unquestioning – and yet it keeps its cutting edge.

Two screens revitalise at least two edges : those that meet.
Two screens direct, brutally, a dialectic of presence.

Simultaneously presence delayed, replayed, redoubled, homogenous, heterogeneous. Two screens can contradict each other in various multiple ways, suggesting new signifying chains as well as raising aesthetic problems that others have been able to grasp by using musical models as a paradigm. The look flows, weaving patterns across the surface of representation, choosing elements and lines of force which sometimes fold back into the totality of the image-composition. A temporal potential realised through spatial means. Reinforcing displacement by the condensation of two images (or more) into a totally new one.

Something serious

A similar paradigm is used in R and in it’s twin screen RR. The central part of the film is based on a transcription of a Bach invention for two voices.
The two screens underscore this paradigm in so far as one is always the simultaneous reflection of the visual development of the other, regardless of the position of the reels (left or right) – the technique of inversion of a theme so often used in music.
The use of the mirror deliberately side-steps the question of the reality of the representation. It no longer has any importance now that we’re in the domain of the reflected image, of imitation. It’s impossible to determine which is a reflection of which. The two images reflect one another in a constant back-and-forth, mimicking to a certain extent the development of the (fake) pans which comprises the film ( shots taken every 5° along a 180° arc). The pans metaphorically evoke, if only superficially, the keyboard. The progression wasn’t, isn’t, the same : in one, range changes pitch ; in the other , space is revealed and extended. They have nothing in common, their development isn’t the same – one lead to growth, augmentation ; the other , a spatial glissando. Sans Titre 84, employs photos of the highly symbolic Arc of Triumph which are then cut into vertical, horizontal and diagonal strips. The individual photos carry little interest, they represent just a brief moment in a series which moves in two different directions. The serial aspect of the photos invokes time, shaping time which subverts the still photo. Every one of these photos -grouped into four different series (one series which circles the arc, shot from24 positions according to a 24-pointed star inscribed on the ground, plus three series approaching the arc from three different avenues) – is a common shot, with standard lighting and composition, thus enhancing the object photographed. The blending of these views (2 by 2) produces new objects which mark distinct moments in the circling of the arc. Architectonics is thus invoked, convoked by the differential reconstruction of the initial object. The arc transforms itself by coupling with itself (unity generates multiplicity). The instantly recognisable identity of the object is thus short-circuited, creating tension in the gaze which seeks to re-establish that lost identity. For the object gets lost in its twice doubled image and (dismembered) must reconstruct itself. The image paradoxically and simultaneously gives of itself in order to withhold. The Arc of Triumph’s power is such that, even though heavily re-worked by the strips, it tends to efface this re-working. Hence the necessity of twinning the screens. Offering a twin, if not an identical one, which will attack the (politically, symbolically, touristically) « much-longed-for » object.

Alas !

Movement, movements are simulated. Realm of imitation, imitation of cinema (that of the partisan of cinema as reflection of reality as well as that of their antagonists, those valiant knights who do battle with that horrible beast). The film presents false movements – the work of fiction. The temporally constructed is neither that of narrativity not that of a simple circling of the arc, because it’s doubled – in phase or not – creating and underscoring the mechanical concordance of the projection situation. Isolate to manipulate, or, how to disguise the way things work.
Itself an imitation (simulation), the reconstruction is agenced through retouched photos, and smooth continuity is disrupted in favour of a numbing of sense(s). And the objects go round. Faced with these doubled objects and twinned screens, the gaze nevertheless privileges, choosing one circuit, selecting one circling rather than another. It’s incapable of dealing with simultaneous contraries.
So the gaze follows one way, which nevertheless begins to tilt when the object encounters itself. Without, for that matter, really identifying itself for what it is. Each time that the « treasured object » draws nearer to its lost form, the other object reappears and sabotages homogeneity with its heterohomogeneity.

yann beauvais, translated by Deke Dusinberre.
Undercut n°16 spring/summer 1986