Cinéma expérimental : Cinédanse | Syncopes et glissements

Editorial

Dancers launch into a repetitive, syncopated, hypnotic rhythm as the signal deteriorates… a dancer’s body is revealed piece by piece, filmed in striking black-and-white close-ups… a negative-image choreography unfolds in the starry sky… a ballet between a chair and a player… dancers glide endlessly through a courtyard or across a city as night falls… In this screening, cinema leads the dance: it sets the rhythm for the ballets of objects and the movements of bodies. It writes the choreography, and it is the dancer.

Mireille Laplace

The series editorial

La promesse

by Loran Radanovic | 2021 | 4 min

La Promesse is the music video made for the electro track by Pirate Céleste (2021). A non-narrative edit of sequences featuring filmed dancers. The rhythm, speed and repetition of the shots are adjusted to give the film a hypnotic quality. The work on the signal—signal degradation, distortion and saturation of the levels, rough coloring—corresponds to an aesthetic style developed across a series of music videos (Chambres Fantomes, Buffalos, Irradiate, La Promesse), seeking to make an image more beautiful even as it degrades. La Promesse is like a coloring book colored outside the lines with primary-color markers. – Loran Radanovic

Look ! we have come through

by Bruce Elder | 1978 | 11 min | 16mm screening

“The film begins by presenting a choreographic ensemble that is never seen in its entirety but underlies the film from beginning to end. Because of its very simplicity, there is no need to formulate an explanation. This film is a kind of autobiography—it is the result of a period in my life when I was seriously ill. Not only is the story suggested by the choreographic events connected to my efforts to regain my health, but most of the work’s formal techniques are also related to this fact.” – Bruce Elder, 1978.

The very eye of night

by Maya Deren | 1955 | 15 min | 16mm screening

The theme of this film is man’s inner world, which he enters as he falls asleep. The laws, qualities and structures of this microcosm are like those of the macrocosm: its space and time are limitless, but both have an unwavering logic. The darkness of night, as the opposite of day, erases the horizontal plane of the earth’s surface, and the movements of the dancers and the camera, freed from the demands of a horizontal plane, become four-dimensional and directional, like those of birds in the air or fish in the water.

Il était une chaise

by Norman MacLaren and Claude Jutra | 1957 | 10 min

“An animated short in Norman McLaren’s dazzling style. The filmmaker illustrates the unusual phenomenon of matter revolting. But why shouldn’t man and object come to an amicable understanding?” – National Film Board of Canada

46bis

by Pascal Baes | 1988 | 4 min

“An exploration of movement quality in pixilation, with choreography by Laurence Rondoni and Sara Denisot on the theme of tango.” – Pascal Baes

Topic I et II

by Pascal Baes | 1989 | 13 min

“Long-exposure work, frame by frame, in the streets of Prague. An ‘Eastern’ atmosphere exploring confinement and self-censorship, aestheticized and deleterious, made possible by a Villa Medici Hors les murs grant.” – Pascal Baes

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