Délices lointains

An ongoing collection of single static shot, mute, showing a view of the cinema facades where Cinematons have been screened.

A film about an ongoing cinematic adventure that began in 1978: a vast anthology of personality portraits called Cinématons, dealing with people in the arts. Historical, ethnological, sociological and psychological, this anthology is a living record of the artistic community of the last 20th century which attempts to answer these questions: Why film everyone? Why choose cultural personalities? How do the subjects look at their image? How much exhibitionism and narcissism is involved in being filmed?

Zones césariennes (which covers the year 2002) is one of Gérard Courant's Filmed Notebooks shot on film. These episodes now coexist with their counterparts filmed on videotape. They are two films with parallel lives but opposing destinies, colliding and eyeing each other warily. They represent two approaches, two styles, two different ways of understanding cinema. Two methods for unfolding time, grasping memory, and exploring the world.

In this avant-garde exercise in self-reflection, director Joseph Morder reminisces about his youth in Guayaquil, Ecuador, where his Jewish parents settled after they left Poland. The heat of August in Paris brings forth memories and at the same time the adult Morder is involved in a love affair. There are no scenes from Ecuador here, and none of the images in the film are used to carry the narration; instead they vaguely illustrate what Morder happens to be saying at the moment.

Almost all of this episode of the Carnets filmés, with the evocative title, Tout est Brisé is devoted to the misdeeds of the storm of 26 December 1999 on the Bois de Vincennes, whose forest extends at the foot of my building. For several months, I was the cinematographic witness of this disaster which brought down more than half of the 130,000 trees in the Bois.

Tout était clair, the new episode of Gérard Courant's Carnets filmés spends considerable time in Saint-Marcellin, a small town in the Isère region at the foot of the Vercors mountain range, where the filmmaker lived during his childhood, and in Burzet, where, since 1980, he has filmed the Good Friday procession every year. A second part is devoted to a lecture by filmmaker Luc Moullet, who draws a comparison between the two French sports dailies: L'Équipe and Aujourd'hui Sport.

Every year since 1980, I have filmed the Good Friday ceremony reconstructing the Passion of Christ in Burzet, a remote village in the Ardèche area, where for seven hundred years, the local people have dressed up to celebrate and perpetuate this religious rite. (Gérard Courant)

Every year since 1980, I have filmed the Good Friday ceremony reconstructing the Passion of Christ in Burzet, a remote village in the Ardèche area, where for seven hundred years, the local people have dressed up to celebrate and perpetuate this religious rite. (Gérard Courant)

Every year since 1980, I have filmed the Good Friday ceremony reconstructing the Passion of Christ in Burzet, a remote village in the Ardèche area, where for seven hundred years, the local people have dressed up to celebrate and perpetuate this religious rite. (Gérard Courant)

Every year since 1980, I have filmed the Good Friday ceremony reconstructing the Passion of Christ in Burzet, a remote village in the Ardèche area, where for seven hundred years, the local people have dressed up to celebrate and perpetuate this religious rite. (Gérard Courant)

Every year since 1980, I have filmed the Good Friday ceremony reconstructing the Passion of Christ in Burzet, a remote village in the Ardèche area, where for seven hundred years, the local people have dressed up to celebrate and perpetuate this religious rite. (Gérard Courant)

Every year since 1980, I have filmed the Good Friday ceremony reconstructing the Passion of Christ in Burzet, a remote village in the Ardèche area, where for seven hundred years, the local people have dressed up to celebrate and perpetuate this religious rite. (Gérard Courant)

Burning Bright depicts a unique gathering of musicians from the Swedish contemporary and creative music scene, and their common voyage through a torched winter landscape. Fire! Orchestra is a collective voice in which the vocal chords are plucked individually by the members. The notes, the words, and the images are torn down to be built up again. We exist to be able to enter as if the titles of the praised records spoke to us: first came "Exit", then "Enter". But how far inside can we go before we find ourselves exiting again?

The film painting is a simultaneous whole to be retro-lit, its material is taken from biblical laconism: Herod marries his brother's wife, Herodias, mother of Salome. John the Baptist condemns this union and is imprisoned by Herod, who nevertheless fears eliminating him given the reputation of the prophet. At a banquet that Herod offered to his hosts, Salome performs a dance that exalts the generosity of Herod ready to perform under word in front of his hosts, a wish to Salome. Herodias advises him to ask for the head of John the Baptist.

In the early '80s, this collective of artists invented a style of cinema made in 4 hands, where each of the protagonists is also a filmmaker.

The turn of a year in a snowy village in Sweden documents the need for change and continuance. A collective film about rites and times. Dala-Floda, Sweden, has 680 inhabitants. In the depths of the blue light of winter, six filmmakers ask themselves what it means to start a new year. Emerging locals formulate their views on time and our need for rituals and reoccurring events. Their answers parade poetically through the snowy and cold village landscape. A sort of time travel takes place and recalls ordinary as well as extraordinary memories and identities. The commonplace is our need for measuring time, our need for a beginning and an end. A ninety-year-old woman shows a way out of the never-ending dream phase of the evoked Phantom Carriage (Selma Lagerlöf) and exclaims: "Really, you ought to reset yourself. You have to feel completely at zero again".

William’s great surprise, his cousin Clovis, whom he did not see again since around thirty years, arrives from New York to visit him. Reunion between both men creates one thousand memories: always so collusive, they become fast inseparable, living again, the space of moment, their young years… Only Elizabeth, wife of William, who has just lost her father, does not share their cheerfulness.

Film and Performance by Leila Colin-Navai.

Wings white, she's red, wings scream, she sings, wings fly, she moans, wings rise, she hides, wings move, she teaches me. Leila, night name, exhumates my childhood memories and introduces me to the marvelous.