Périssable Paradis

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?

Chris Marker, intrigued by the sight of yellow cats perched on walls on the streets of Paris, films the major national and international sociopolitical events of the early 2000s.

This episode of Carnets filmés, Délices lointains, which spans the year 2004, reaches its climax in its last part with my trip to Mexico with the photographer Barbara Peón Solis.

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.

Amours décolorées is a cinematographic poem to the glory of Mariola San Martin, model, stylist, dancer and Spanish photographer.

Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.

Le Passeur immobile, which covers the year 1987, is a Booklet filmed stuck between The Days and the Nights (1986) and The Artifice and the Fake (1988). These Notebooks have been punctuating my activity as a filmmaker for about fifteen years. They are like a life parallel to my other films and film series (Cinema, Group Portrait, Read, etc.). They are also like a letter to the spectators.

I give a methodical account of my film work: the creation of new series (Lire, Trio, Avec Mariola), the shooting of a new feature film (Amours décolorées which will take ten years to edit) with Mariola San Martin.

Reel 34 of Gérard Courant’s on-going Cinematon series.

Between his tax problems and his legal battle with his wife for the custody of his daughter, these are hard times for the action movie star who finds that even Steven Seagal has pinched a role from him! This fictionalized version of Jean-Claude Van Damme returns to the country of his birth to seek the peace and tranquility he can no longer enjoy in the United States, but inadvertently gets involved in a bank robbery with hostages.

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.

A butcher whose meat is most tender, surrounded successively by ephemeral and delightful cashiers.

A bio-doc about Micheline Presle changes into a thrilling investigation of the long hidden truth about European cinema. This mockumentary thriller uncovers Hollywood's unsuspected plot against the European motion picture industry. Numerous directors and stars appear in the film, making it a choice morsel for all film lovers.

Poetic sci-fi film as an homage to Cinema, Cocteau, Goodis and to American B-series of the 1940s. Constructed exclusively on photograms in black and white and freely inspired on Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville.

A writer suffering from a lack of inspiration sneaks his way into the lives of a star television journalist and his lead ballerina daughter to write, unbeknownst to them, a non-authorized biography. Meanwhile, in Brittany, twenty-year-old Bruno, who lives with his parents, doesn't yet know the consequences that this story will have on his existence...