MAGMA #24 | Écrits sur du vent, Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose

Editorial

“Cinema is blood, it’s tears, with violence, hatred, films with death and films with love.”

Douglas Sirk, quoted by Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Part I

Ouarda Ouarda: Yet Another Flower Film

by Samy Benammar | 2026 | Québec | 5 min

Flowers shimmer along a strip of 16 mm film, just before or just after the flames. You can hear them lament, cry out, and resist. In response to this shrillness, an explosion of light bursts from a black petal.

Retour d’un repère

by Rose Lowder | 1979 | France | 3 min

The notion of a constant marker comes from poetic rhetoric, where it refers to an element that shapes rhythm. One of the figures of poetry that develops the temporal aspect of a rhythmic element’s unfolding in a particular way is the “pantoum,” of Eastern (Malaysian) origin. The film’s structure is based on a visual transposition of the verse structure of a “pantoum.” Thus, the frame-by-frame filming operations intersect in relation to the filmed space and intertwine in relation to the elements considered in this process. In this way, the procedure that separates, isolates, and records certain aspects of a scene (here, a tree in the garden of the Rocher des Doms) by successively adjusting the focus across a series of frames according to various scores is put into practice in a particular way in Retour d’un repère.

Fulgurations

video by Darjeeling Bouton

Fires, flowers, death, cries, love, glory, and beauty. A collage of images, voices, words, rustling, and flashes.

Part II.

Amytis

improvisation by David Merlo

Suspended songs, horsehair, and steel.

David uses friction in the form of small-scale hypnosis that, depending on where you look from, piles up into chaos. Angels and ghosts cross paths there, dance, bring their wildness into harmony, then scatter, leaving their offspring to haunt those who follow. Arid lands, clouds, emptiness, and dawns face off from their platforms. Accessible through ricochets or transparencies. The straight line is lost there, and dreams replenish themselves. The offering made to the storm buys them a reprieve, until the next great calm.

About the artists

Samy Benammar

Filmmaker, photographer, and critic based in Montréal. Drawing on his Algerian roots and childhood in a working-class environment, his work combines a reflective approach to documentary with tactile experimentation. He has also served on the editorial committees of Hors Champ, 24 images, and Panorama-cinéma, and is pursuing a doctorate on colonial photography in Algeria.

Rose Lowder

French and Peruvian, Rose Lowder was born in 1941 in Miraflores, Lima, Peru. From 1977 onward, Lowder focused her attention on the visual aspect of the filmmaking process. At the invitation of Jean Rouch and his team at the Université de Paris X, she brought together part of her research in a doctorate in literature and the humanities titled Le film expérimental en tant qu’instrument de recherche visuelle (1987). Active in programming rarely screened films since 1977, she co-founded the Archives du film expérimental d’Avignon (AFEA, 1981) to build a collection of films and documents and publish several books: La part du visuel, films expérimentaux canadiens (AFEA, 1991), L’Image en mouvement (AFEA, 2002), and Images / discours (AFEA, 2006), to make these works more accessible to the public. She was a lecturer (1994–1995), then an associate professor (practice, history, theory, and aesthetics, at the UFR des arts plastiques et sciences d’art, Université de Paris I (1996–2005). Focusing her research on visual perception in relation to the medium of cinematic expression, her work has concentrated on different ways of modulating the visual, plastic, graphic, or photographic characteristics of the image as it transforms over time. This research led her to compose the image in the camera, often by weaving images together as the film passed through the camera several times. She gradually developed a way of working with drawn scores to distinguish, during recording, between frames already exposed and those still to be made. This way of working is relatively complex and meticulous, as it involves recording a succession of images, frame by frame in the camera, so that they appear simultaneously on screen when projected.

David Merlo

A composer, improviser, and performer, he develops a practice at the boundaries of music and sound art. He is involved in current, experimental, and contemporary music, first in Marseille from 2006, where he co-founded the Daath label and created the Subspecies entity as an instrumental ensemble, and then in Paris since 2016. By structuring the Subspecies company, he develops multidisciplinary projects (PHASE, Stratégies du Geste, Threshold) that explore our individual and collective relationship to the representation of sound phenomena. The electric bass is often at the heart of this exploration, with the aim of extending its sonic range. His collaborations in the fields of live performance (Cie Malaxe-Julien Dégremont, Cie Animae Corpus -Thibaud Le Maguer..), performance art (Cie des Corps Parlants-Mathilde Monfreux..), cinema (Anne Alix, Guillermo Moncayo..) and contemporary arts (Hugo Deverchère, Lyoudmila Milanova..) join his work as an electric bassist in groups with varied aesthetics: post-rock (HoaxHoax), death metal (1980), contemporary jazz (Eve Risser’s Red Desert Orchestra), improvised music (Fabien Rimbaud, Tom Malmendier..), and Afro-rock (Musungu)

About MAGMA

MAGMA is a twice-monthly event held at VIDEODROME 2 since 2021. The film(s) screened echo the musical performances that open