Focus

Cécile Fontaine

Part 2 Political Deconstructions

88mins

Political Deconstructions follows a brief history of phantasmagorical desires that traverse society, the political ordering of matter and life. Sequences of newsreels, commercials, fiction films, and nature documentaries are dislocated, altered, and relocated to create new pictorial territories. With the corrosion of film, political occurrences turn oneiric; the rationality of an irrational system of truth that produces itself through images is disassembled and scattered.

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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

Sun 31 May

19:00 - 21:00 / ACUD KINO

OVEREATING
France, 1984, 3’ 00”, 16mm, DCP

A détournement of a film depicting a man eating a chicken; photogrammes are frozen and repeated on a loop.

2 MADE FOR TV FILMS
France, 1984, 6’ 00”, 16mm, DCP

Recycled footage from commercials transformed through an intricate plastic and coloristic treatment, turning their meaning inside out.

STORIES
France, 1989, 7’ 00”, 16mm
A recollection of Western machines of desire, cowboys and football; a discovery of humanity separated from itself by its own images.

SANS TITRE, MAI 1988
France, 1988, 6’ 00”, 16mm, silent

Images of nature, indigenous communities, trees, football players, tanks, and helicopters, mostly shot by Pierre Fontaine and irregularly altered with the use of bleach - a film traversed by its own destruction on the disintegration of nature and life.

CRUISES
France, 1989, 8’ 00”, 16mm
Memories of a trip taken by Cécile Fontaine on a boat from Marseille to La Réunion at the age of eleven, interlaced with amateur footage shot by a German soldier in 1941, bringing together family and war images.

HISTOIRES PARALLÈLES
France, 1990, 11’ 00”, 16mm, silent

Found footage of Indian newsreels depicting official visits intersects with footage shot by Cécile Fontaine’s father, radically altered through chemical manipulations. An inquiry into the substratum of recent visual histories, the grounds upon which a certain knowledge of the world emerges, and the conditions that make it real.

LA PÊCHE MIRACULEUSE
France, 1995, 10’ 00”, 16mm
Images commissioned by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Tourism on the Seychelles Islands erode until geography and imagination become one.

LION LIGHT
France, 1996, 2’ 00”, 16mm, silent

A woman holds a camera (gun) and shoots lions. On cinema and its viewing-mechanics; on the density of the human gaze on nature.

SAFARI LAND
France, 1996, 8’ 00”, 16mm
The problem of making nature the subject of the weapon system gun-camera which keeps its target in constant sight, on the loss of what is already perceived.

SILVER RUSH
France, 1998, 7’ 00”, 16mm
A hunt through all sorts of images - from documentaries, fiction films, amateur cinema, commercials, and newsreels - for the abstract qualities of colour, texture, and movement.

THE LOST LAST SHOT
France, 1999, 8’ 00”, 16mm
Firearms, protected birds, children’s illustrations juxtaposed in a tale of cruelty and innocence.

BOY’S BEST FRIEND
France, 2002, 12’ 00”, 16mm
Commercial and educational films intersected, decomposed, and dissolving into one another

Cécile Fontaine

Part 2

Political Deconstructions

Sun 31 May

Wed 27

Thu 28

Fri 29

Sat 30

Sun 31