Fictions réelles

Through his films, Clément Cogitore creates “situations”. These situations mobilise associations of images and ideas which are not formulated explicitly, but presented to the viewer: they are open to his interpretation and invite deeper reflection. The ellipses, gaps, the malleability of the words and images, the smoke and mirrors, the pitfalls, the plausible, the realism and the stylisation are all part of his cinematic writing. Using a film by Clément Cogitore as the centrepiece of each programme, every screening produces resonances and is interwoven with other films by contemporary directors and artists. 

Résonances: Tuesday 10 October – 8pm                               

How do words and images come together to form a narrative and play with our belief systems? With Ely and Nina Biélutine, a couple of Russian collectors filmed by Clément Cogitore, we never quite know how to view what they show us or whether to believe what they say: truth, lies and what is plausible become indiscernible. A precursor – Uncle Boonmee, who can recall his past lives (2010), a film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, is made up of a series of spiral movements that explore death, reincarnation, repression and violence in Nabua, a Thai village. Through variations in the narrative and the mise en scène, an unease is established with all the strangeness and anxiety of a dream. A commission for the Paris Opera, Sarah Winchester, opera fantôme [ghost opera] by Bertrand Bonello, brings an impossible opera to the stage about the madness of the wife of the inventor of the repetition rifle, who is haunted by the dead victims of the War of Secession.                                  

Biélutine, dans les jardins du temps by Clément Cogitore, France, 2011, 36'
A letter to Uncle Boonmee by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thaïlande/Royaume-Uni, 2009, 18'
Sarah Winchester, opéra fantôme by Bertrand Bonello, France, 2016, 24'

Narratives and Mythologies: Tuesday 21 November – 8pm                                                                             

L’intervalle de resonance – an installation by Clément Cogitore – takes two unexplained physical phenomena as its starting point: the sounds emitted by the Aurora Borealis and the appearance of mysterious light forms in Alaska. In both cases, superstitions, Inuit and Sami belief systems and the search for scientific explanations intersect and feed off each other. The same dialectic is at work in Kempinski by Neil Beloufa, in which he asked actors he met in Mali to imagine their future in the present. His film blends reality and anticipation, ethnology and criticism and blurs the stereotypes of exoticism. In Greenland Unrealized, Dania Reymond adapts a script by Antonioni that was never brought to the screen so as to explore the temporal indecision of language and space. Meanwhile in Japan, Élise Florenty et Marcel Türkowsky combine fantasizing and scientific research to re-evaluate the experience of a couple – the Hashimotos – whose curious experiment involves talking to a cactus about anything from kabuki theatre to the Fukushima disaster. 

L'intervalle de résonance by Clément Cogitore, France, 2016, 23’
Greenland Unrealised by Dania Reymond, France, 2012, 10’
Kempinski by Neil Beloufa, France, 2007, 14'
Conversation with a Cactus by Élise Florenty & Marcel Türkowsky, Allemagne/France/Japon, 2017, 45’

Intervals and Permeability: Tuesday 5 December – 8pm 

The intricacies of editing and layout are the mainstays of this screening. Un archipel was inspired by a recent news item about a brand new nuclear submarine which ran aground off the coast of Scotland. Clément Cogitore constructs a narrative of troubling veracity by editing heterogeneous elements full of cinematic references, including intertitles from silent cinema and found footage. Ana Vaz brings hidden spaces to the surface by juxtaposing sound material from a film by Manoel de Oliveira and the history of Brazil; Mariana Caló and Francisco Queimadela highlight new ways of organising thoughts: Apichatpong Weerasethakul splinters times and spaces by imbuing a place with the memories of the people inhabiting it; Lav Diaz brings Shakespeare’s words up to the surface in the middle of flood waters engulfing a town in 2050.                                                        

Un archipel by Clément Cogitore, France, 2011, 10'
A Trama e o Círculo by Mariana Caló & Francisco Queimadela, Portugal, 2014, 34’
Há Terra ! by Ana Vaz, France/Brésil, 2016, 12'
Ang araw bago ang wakas [Le jour avant la fin] by Lav Diaz, Philippines, 2016, 17’