ÉLICLIPSE multiplie les points de vue sur Paris en recourant à un support de communication banale: la carte postale. 154 cartes postales ont été coupées en bandes verticales et mélangées deux à deux. Le mélange des cartes s’est fait selon divers critères parmi lesquels on peut distinguer les critères: politiques, plastiques, historiques, humoristiques, etc. Une fois les objets définis, le film joue une improvisation plus ou moins préparée.
Œuvre appartenant au Forum des Images (Vidéothèque de Paris) et au Museum of Modern Art (New York).
« In two films by yann beauvais, the issues of architectonic representation and monumentality are dealt with directly. The cut-up postcard and photograph serve as material through which beauvais constructs a recomposition of architectonic space in his films, Eliclipse and Sans Titre (1984). In Eliclipse, postcard images of Parisian landmarks are cut into vertical bands; every other stripe of the image is replaced with a corresponding stripe from another postcard image, resulting in the blend of the figuration of the two images. Intriguingly, this manual collage procedure could be done in video by mixing two images signals with a square wave matrix. The artisanal cut and paste of the actual postcard rather than an electronic interspersion of two signal-based images is, however, a choice which is distinguishes two distinct phases of production, first, a physical cutting of the profilmic object, to be followed by the montage of the film. The bifurcation and intermittancy of images that results is not simply analogous to the video process. It rather insists on the plastic materiality of cutting and montage. The edited film then moves us from one blended combination to another, sites which exist only as the conflation of two referential sites, views simultaneously doubled and bifurcated. Within the ellipsis performed upon the pictorial unity, the insertion of another image which is at once different and similar leads to a consideration of these monumental views as symbolic sites. No longer granted their integral monumental unity, they yield something of their symbolic power as souvenir image. »
Maureen Turim in The Displacement of Architecture, Avant-Garde Films in Cinema & Architecture, Iris n° 12 Méridiens Klincksieck, Paris 1991
Film belonging to the Forum des Images (Vidéothèque de Paris) and to the Museum of Modern Art (New York).
