Focus

Cécile Fontaine

Part 1 Home (Made) Movies

80mins

This program regroups Cécile Fontaine’s research on the nature of film emulsion and the relationality between materiality and immateriality; an exploration through mechanical and chemical alterations of the celluloid of the entanglement, transmutation, and fragmentation of light, movement, color, and form.

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Cécile Fontaine is a figure in the French experimental film scene whose body of work, encompassing over fifty titles, forms a constellation of plastic and material experimentations—collages and décollages, encrustations layered upon the film’s emulsion. Her oeuvre carries a particular attentiveness to the layered nature of film, to the specificities of the medium, to its potentialities, fragilities, and openings. Characterised by the appropriation of already existing images and their subsequent alteration, destruction, and renewal, Fontaine’s cinema develops a singular apprehension of film as a system of consciousness and a system of knowing.

TICKETS

Sat 30 May

21:00 - 23:00 / ACUD KINO

SELF-PORTRAIT N° 1 (TOILETTE)
France, 1982, 3’ 00”, 16mm, silent, DCP

One of the first films made by Cécile Fontaine: a collection of fragmentary images taken by the filmmaker while washing her face and doing her hair.

A COLOR MOVIE
France, 1983, 5’ 00”, 16mm, silent, DCP

A series of visual experiments: an overexposed self-portrait shot on reflective glass, intercut with sections made by tearing, burning, painting, and engraving the celluloid.

CARS LIGHT ON A RAINY NIGHT (WITH DIAGONAL BLEACH)
France, 1985, 2’ 00”, 16mm, silent, DCP

Car headlights in the rain and moonlight in a puddle, with occasional bleach marks—curved, linear, light, heavy.

PARIS, LE 7 JANVIER 1988
France, 1988, 8’ 00”, 16mm, silent, DCP

The filmmaker’s daily passage through the city: subway stations, the rapid movement of people on busy streets, bars, cafés, passing cars, policemen—fugitive images warping and colliding.

3 SHORTS [L'ATELIER DE PEINTURE + CHURCH + SUBJECT. SOUND COLOR PICTURE]
France, 1984, 5’ 00”, 16mm, silent, DCP

L’Atelier de peinture reconstructs the textures and chromatic dimensions of paint through the use of bleach, the displacement of the emulsion side, or by cutting 35mm diapositives into Super 8.

Church: the dissolution of images of a church through the use of ammonia, marking the transference of a real space into a figural one.

Subject. Sound Color Picture: an examination of verticality made with the recutting of found footage into Super 8.

LE CALVAIRE
France, 1986, 3’ 00”, 16mm, silent, DCP

A cameraless film created by manually exposing the film strip to the red and green LED lights of a television set.

ABSTRACT FILM EN COULEUR
France, 1991, 3’ 00”, 16mm, silent

A field of viscous light interweaving spectral convolutions.

LA FISSURE
France, 1984, 1’ 00”, 16mm, silent, DCP

Intense yellow colour frequencies tear the mass of the film.

MOSAÏC
France, 1987, 3’ 00”, 16mm, silent, DCP

A system of superimposed rectangular and circular shapes resulting from the reassemblage of a Super 8 film roll manually exposed.

ALMABA
France, 1988, 5’ 00”, 16mm, silent

The material composition of the film laid bare to create a spinning flow of colours, textures, and shapes.

SPACED ODDITIES
France, 2004, 6’ 00”, 16mm

An aquatic, dream-like landscape drawn from a black and white documentary on fresh waters, decomposed and recomposed through collage.

CORRESPONDANCE
France, 1985, 2’ 00”, 16mm, silent, DCP

Frames filmed by the filmmaker’s father, Pierre Fontaine, who documented his family life over the years in various formats (16mm, Super 8). Around the time of the making of this film, Cécile was living in the United States and was occasionally receiving film reels by mail from her father - correspondence celebrated in this film.

CHARLOTTE
France, 1991, 3’ 00”, 16mm, silent

A fragment of film composed of three photogrammes copied and repeated across the 3 minutes film roll, exposed manually to red and green TV lights.

LE DÉJEUNER SUR L'HERBE (OU PIQUE-NIQUE)
France, 1986, 1’ 00”, 16mm, silent, DCP

A Super 8 film made by peeling off the emulsion from reels sent to Cécile by her father and transferring it onto a new surface.

HOME MOVIE
France, 1986, 5’ 00”, 16mm, silent

A family film found in a second-hand shop is first decomposed, desquamated, and formally subjected to various transformations. Histories of distant private lives, lost and reactualised.

SUNDAY
France, 1993, 6’ 00”, 16mm

Personal home movies interwoven with found footage from a documentary on the Seychelles Islands, personal and alien microhistories convoking the warmth of a layered impression of the island of La Réunion.

CROSS WORLDS
France, 2006, 12’ 00”, 16mm

Juxtaposed images from 16 professional documentaries and amateur home and holiday movies, tracing new pathways between distant geographies. An imaginative cartographic act.

JAPON SERIES
France, 1991, 7’ 00”, 16mm, silent

A chromatic reworking of found documentary footage of a Paris performance by a Japanese group of butoh dancers. As the human bodies of dancers transmute into other forms, the body of the film transgresses inexorably into a subliminal color-space.

Cécile Fontaine

Part 1

Home (Made) Movies

Sat 30 May

Wed 27

Thu 28

Fri 29

Sat 30

Sun 31