Blacklight: Cinematographic Experience ( Les Corps de Vents (The Body Of Winds) / Le Cristallin / Elez / Macula / Tabula Rasa ) ( BlackLight (Black light) )

Blacklight: Cinematographic Experience (DVD) (*)

~~$32.99~~ $26.97

Original Title: Les Corps de Vents (The Body Of Winds) / Le Cristallin / Elez / Macula / Tabula Rasa
Alternate Title: BlackLight (Black light)
Language Selections:
English ( Subtitles )
French ( Subtitles )
Silent ( Dolby Digital Stereo )

Product Origin/Format:
France ( PAL/Region 0 )

Running Time:
60 min

Aspect Ratio:
Fullscreen

Special Features:
Interactive Menu
Making Of
Scene Access
Black & White

Movie filmed in 2006 and produced in:
France ( France, Benelux )

Directed By:
Carole Arcega
Sebastien Cros

Written By:
Mikaël Rabetrano
Frédéric D. Oberland

Actors:
Carole Arcega
Sebastien Cros

Synopsis:

This compilation brings together films of a new genre, between cult cinema and abstract art, a form of science fiction bordering on the experimental and the fantastic. The black and white universe presented here is inherited from comic books, drawings, calligraphy, and of course photography. Label Ombres presents new hybrid works, evolving in the imagination through expanded cinema, a cinema of sensations.
This DVD contains:
Les Corps de Vents, MICHAEL RABETRANO and FREDERIC D. OBERLAND, 2005, 20 min
Le Cristallin, CAROLE ARCEGA, 2002, 7 min
Elez, MICHAEL RABETRANO, 2002, 2 min
Macula, CAROLE ARCEGA, 2004, 16 min
Tabula Rasa, SEBASTIEN CROS, 2005, 10 min

This selection entitled "Black Light" brings together 5 films that cut across different genres including science fiction, alternative cinema, and abstract art. The selected films co-exist in the common ambience of a universe in black and white. Each filmmaker aims to express their artistic sensibility using film-based light (16mm films, super 8, photography, darkroom techniques.) This compilation by Label Ombres in collaboration with Lowave has created digitized editions of these shorts for the first time.
THE BODY OF WINDS (2004)
A sensitive acousmatic experience invoking visuals and sounds, The Body of Winds is a heterophonic and radical film. A voyage by night through snow, metal, wind, phantom voices, fog, noise and childhood. Sometimes we hear screams. We speak the language of birds. Listen and relax. You don't have to close your eyes.

ELEZ (2002)
A film made without camera, Elez redefines the photographic form of film. The black film ribbon is laid down horizontally on a light table. The filmmaker becomes calligrapher, painter or sculpture. He digs into the chemical emulsion in order to reveal the light. During the projection, lines of shade are pulled vertically, crossing between images without stopping, invading the entire space of the screen over the duration of a beam: our bodies remain suspended for two minutes. Sonic wave and pure visual energy, electrified black-bone, this film is an imprint of the body, the first gesture of writing.

MACULA (2004)
The macula is commonly known as the yellow spot, located near the center of the retina at which visual perception is the most acute. A photosensitive body rises from shadow to burn out in light. Skin emulsion sensitive to this world, undergoing different plastic stages until its final fusion with the film. Washed out, scrubbed and scrapped, painted, dazzled, it is pushed to saturation in order to accomplish its very last cinematographic mutation. The body alters, taking a new form, inextricable from the filmic matter. The story of a mutation where no one could figure which turned into what, did the artist become the film material, the pellis, the peculla ? Or is it the other way around? Photosensitive being or alive filmic membrane?

TABULA RASA (2005)
Tabula Rasa is the second chapter of a three part project, where its central element, which follows Nocte, is a performance continuing the same plan: a double screen where images of a black and white reel unwind along a third beam where matter is reinvented for every projection. An imaginary journey through Europe tracing the cartography of ruins, a melancholic voyage through time, a look at fingerprints and traces, absences, stones and dust.

LE CRISTALLIN (2002)
Le Cristallin is a film in which one forgets the photography of cinema to find oneself in its film strip, where the film is a living organ. The film is about the pastimes of bad gods, the Others, those below. In the beginning, bubbles remain stuck in mucus, from Serrano to trans-lucid cow blood. Then everything comes to life, just as with microscopes in biology class, when we are asked to draw cells and amoebas. Then there are bones, crocodiles, cemeteries of the Innocent, the punishment of craving monks, sodomites and the perjured in a tiny hell lit by phosphor. It's the era of wood gatherers, witches, the Renaissance. The cow's mucus has hardened; spider's spit has formed long soft strings.

DVD label Lowave teams with Label Ombres to present this uneven collection of shorts created by a loosely associated group of young artists, most of which were originally intended as unique events, live performances employing extended cinema techniques. The enclosed booklet shares an unfortunate tendency I've noticed in program notes for experimental film: providing notes which consist of badly written, incomprehensible prose poems, which do not help to illuminate the films, and provide little pleasure on their own. The filmmakers included in this collection, incidentally, share another unfortunate tendency with other experimental film artists: a propensity for making closing credits for their films which are artfully distorted so that they are impossible to read, as if to prove that they would never stoop so low as to actually wish to communicate something to an audience.

'The Body of Winds' presents a collectively created soundtrack, credited to FredŽric D. Oberland, of ostinatos, noises, and obstinately inept drumming. The extremely restrained, minimalist visuals include very occasional wispy flashes of light on a black screen. (The screen is totally black for the first four minutes.) Occasional subtitles show an opaque, poetic text by director Mika'l Rabetrano, apparently having to do with love. The accompanying 'making of…' documentary, in the form of a double screen projection, makes clear what is going wrong here. In the doc, as we watch this group of young artists feverishly banging on pots and exposing film, we see all of the passion and energy which is completely missing from the final product. They have not learned the trick of transferring the excitement of an improvisation into the work, so that it becomes visible and audible for the audience.

Another Rabetrano/Oberland collaboration, the 2 minute 'Elez,' combines black and white stripes, dancing schmutz, and screeching noises. It has no particularly expressive or original qualities.

Director Carole Arcega's artistic skill and clear personal vision make her a stand-out in this group. She is obsessed with exploring a tactile, highly physical identification between herself and the filmstrip. Her 7 minute short 'Le Cristallin' appears to be made from shots of melting celluloid, interspersed with flashes of light and black frames, but it could just as well be layers of melting ice or the nerve tissue inside a brain. The textures in the film are so palpable one really does feel as if one is entering the filmstrip. Franck Rochard's score of looped noise does not contribute appreciably to the experience.

In Arcega's second film on the DVD, the 16 minute 'Macula,' a naked body is seen first immersed in water, and later sheathed in rubber. Layered with bubbly, plastic textures, the imagery has a distinctly fetal look. Once again, Arcega has created a highly effective sense of the body merging with materials that seem foreign to it. Sebastian Cros' score of breathing sounds and electronic noises heighten the tactile strangeness of the film. The final sequence, in which both the music and the white and black negative images reach a violent intensity, creates a kind of nightmare vision, in which the body seems to be on fire. (The enclosed booklet promised some stills from this film as well, but I couldn't locate them on the DVD.)

Cros' performance/film 'Tabula Rasa' is a double screen projection, containing random images of spiders, windows, scaffolding, etc. The two screens are overlaid by patterns of crackly black and white patterns. The sound score is a collage of ambient noise. The film's title and style firmly link it to the 'random collection of interesting things to look at and listen to' school of art, pioneered 60 years ago by John Cage. When Cage first started making such pieces in the 1940s, they served a very important function: they taught us that some of the most interesting combinations of images and sounds are achieved when the artwork is liberated from the conscious intention of the artist to 'express himself.' They likewise taught us that everything in the world can be seen as having the same beauty as an artwork, and that if we listened and looked at our everyday world with the same intensity we usually reserve for art, we could fill our lives with aesthetic pleasure.

60 years later, these ideas are extremely familiar to us, and they no longer have the power of liberating our imaginations that they once did. Cage's piano piece '4 minutes 33 seconds,' in which the pianist sits at the piano without playing anything for the specified duration, has long since taught me that the ambient sound in any space can be as beautiful as any music. Now, when I am in the mood to seek aesthetic pleasure from random input, I greatly prefer to go outside and take a walk, where the random sensations will not only be interesting, they will tell me something about the larger world, and I will furthermore be able to direct my own attention wherever I choose. I no longer particularly have a need to ask artists to assemble these random impressions on my behalf. Like many people under 60, I've been seeing this kind of work for my entire life, and I wonder if I'm the only one who no longer feels the need for it.

This product was added to our catalog on Tuesday 17 January, 2012.

Customers who bought this product also purchased

Jacques Demy Collection - 12-DVD Box Set (DVD)