Faits Divers. 9 Films from France, 1979-1994

Program (synopses from Light Cone’s catalog):

Systema (Françoise Thomas, 1984, 4’)

The isolated elements of a typewriter, or the typewriter as a whole, illuminated by coloured spotlights, are first of all considered as plastic objects. Gathered together on the screen, more or less identifiable, they can then play with other elements. In the case of abstract elements, only shapes, movements and colours connect them, but as soon as silhouettes appear, other relationships are established. Do the isolated elements of the machine return to their mechanical functions? Do they constitute another system in which the silhouettes are caught or a system in which these silhouettes participate?

Radio-Serpent (Unglee, 1980, 12’)

Radio-Serpent uses motifs drawn from a milieu, a fashion, a spirit of the times characteristic of the early 1980s. As for the sets, one may note the choice of vinyl, which has become increasingly prominent in recent years, as well as the use of neon lighting—or, more precisely, multicolored fluorescent tubes—which have likewise become commonplace.

Divers-épars (yann beauvais, 1987, 12’)

“This film is a series of shot or found sequences (of cities that I frequent) which, in the editing, display a fluidity and continuity eluding narration. The sequences are shaped by the editing according to various arrangements which respect the film's possible direction: passage from one place to another, from one moment to another. To pass, bridging one point to another, is to transform oneself, become other. The film employs certain leitmotivs which relaunch the flow and facilitate diverse transformations of scattered sensations. This film, although renewing lyricism, does not deny formalism which it uses in another manner, while taking into account the meaning/possible meanings produced through linking images and their evocative passage.” — yann beauvais

Swimmer (Michael Mazière, 1987, 6’)

"Swimmer takes the act of swimming as an emotive subjective experience. Drawing from the psychological and symbolic the film creates an event where fear and pleasure exist side by side and intertwined. A film at the juncture of formal speculation and psychological distanciation." — Michael Mazière

Sécan ciel (version courte) (Jean-Michel Bouhours, 1979, 4’)

Images filmed in Étretat and in Paris in the fall of 1976 with a motorized camera: the sequences of images were then "stuffed" with painted elements acting as intermediaries in the decomposition of movement. In the image, we can see the silhouette of Patrick Delabre. The film was finalized 2 or 3 years later, in 1979, as a step out of the minimalism of previous years.

Parcelle (Rose Lowder, 1979, 3’)

Composed frame by frame in the camera, Parcelle (fragment, particle or bit) rests upon the alternate appearance and variable duration of tiny colored squares or circles placed on black backgrounds and inserted in series between plain white or colored images. Although the film, filmed frame by frame, may appear conventional on a technical level, this is not the case conceptually as it has been conceived to pinpoint situations requiring the sense of perception to process images in various time lengths according to the characteristics viewed, a procedure which provokes the experience of optical superimpositions on the screen.

Palme d’or (Marcelle Thirache, 1993, 4’)

Palm trees in Cagnes-sur-Mer. The rapid and tight camera movements playing on the light make it an abstract film that discovers other forms, other materials. The camera-brush brushes the canvas on which the madness and sensuality of a small Mediterranean landscape are inscribed in movement.

Log Abstract - 1988 (Scott Hammen, 1988, 16’)

“Log Abstract: Sequences extracted from a film diary whose title refers to the following meanings of the English words “log” and “abstract,” which seem capable of describing the film. Log: a record of a ship’s speed, or of the distance traveled each day. A record of a ship’s course or voyage (to be entered in a logbook, for example, noting the miles traveled). Abstract: that which contains or concentrates within itself the essential qualities of a larger thing. To withdraw, separate; to consider separately.” — Scott Hammen

New York Long Distance (yann beauvais, 1994, 9’)

“A film about my relationship to New York since 1962. It deals with the distance between a memory and the image of this memory, a distance one always tries to abolish. In this personal film we see the images of a city from a close distance, with autobiographical fragments on the soundtrack. The distance of recollection. The trace of this distance shapes the memory as much as the places, haunted by so many stories, so that our marks will blow up in a crash. A crash leading to a collapse in a vortex of affects.” — yann beauvais

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Francisco Algarín Navarro (Sevilla, 1983) is an independent writer, editor, and film curator. His work focuses on the dissemination of experimental, queer, and feminist approaches to analog film. He wrote a monograph about Jacques Rivette and has edited books on correspondences between filmmakers, Mani Kaul, Jean-Claude Rousseau, Jeannette Muñoz, Nathaniel Dorsky & Jerome Hiler, and will soon publish on Warren Sonbert, Sandra Lahire & Sarah Pucill, and Maria Klonaris & Katerina Thomadaki. 

Carlos Saldaña (Jerez de la Frontera, 1996) is a film preservationist and programmer. He has edited books on Mani Kaul, Jean-Claude Rousseau, Frans van de Staak, Nathaniel Dorsky & Jerome Hiler, and will soon publish on Warren Sonbert, Sandra Lahire & Sarah Pucill, and Maria Klonaris & Katerina Thomadaki. He also shoots on film and video.

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