Carte blanche
Philippe-Alain Michaud – Centre Pompidou
From the director of the Paris museum’s Experimental Cinema department, two film séances dedicated to the work of
Cécile Fontaine
INTRASTEVERE CINEMA – Room 2, May 27, 9:30 p.m.
Entertaiment
Q&A with author and curator
INTRASTEVERE CINEMA – Room 1, May 28, 4 p.m.
Masterclass by Cecile Fontaine
Moderates by the curator
INTRASTEVERE CINEMA – Room 2, May 28, 6:30 p.m.
Cross Worlds
histoires naturelles de la destruction
Since the early 1980s, Cécile Fontaine has created a unique body of work using recycled films (home movies, commercials, newsreels, fragments of fiction films, etc.) that she subjects to a kind of controlled destruction. The first technique employed by the director arose from an accident which, according to the principle of serendipity, she turned into a protocol: while peeling off a tape splice on a color film, she noticed that the top layer of tripack emulsion, the magenta one, was peeling off from the base; transferring it back to the base with an offset, she obtained image duplication and color distortions. The director gradually perfected this “dry” technique, practicing “chipping” or regular detachment, to which she added scrapings and additions of India ink or colored acetates. At the same time, Cécile Fontaine developed a so-called “wet” technique, in which the emulsion was peeled off with a knife after the film had been immersed for a long period in a bath of ammonia-based detergent, producing color alterations and depigmentation. By turning the medium against the image, the chemical substance against the photographic, Cécile Fontaine substitutes a process of destruction for the creative process and transforms documentary material into a plastic proposal belonging to the poetics of vestige or ruin: decomposed, torn, bleached or overcolored sequences and fragmented soundtracks reveal a vision of history as a history of destruction, that of societies and ecosystems whose traces are preserved by the films by reproducing rather than describing them.
Philippe-Alain Michaud
entertaiment
La fissure
France / 1984 / 2’
Golf Entretien
France / 1984 / 3’
Home Movie
France / 1986 / 5’
Mai 1988
France / 1988 / 5’
Cruises
France / 1989 / 8’
Histoires parallèles
France / 1990 / 11’
La Pêche miraculeuse
France / 1994 / 10’
cross worlds
Safari Land
France / 1996 / 10’
Lion Light
France / 1996 / 2’
Silver rush
France / 1998 / 8’
Last lost Shot
France / 1999 / 7’
Spaced Oddities
France / 2004 / 6’
Cross Worlds
France / 2006 / 15’
Cécile Fontaine
Born in 1957 in the south of France, she grew up in an overseas French “department,” Île de la Réunion, in the Indian Ocean; she studied art in both France (1975-1979) and Boston (1980-1986), where she began making films in 1982 after taking an evening film course at the Massachusetts College of Art and then enrolling full-time at the School of Museum of Fine Arts, majoring in film. She returned to France in 1986 and has lived in Paris ever since, where she teaches art full time at an elementary school and makes films.
Philippe-Alain Michaud
He is curator at the Musée National d’Art Moderne – Centre Pompidou, in charge of the museum’s film collection. He teaches film history and theory at the Université de Genève. He is the author of Aby Warburg et l’image en mouvement (Macula, 1998), Le peuple des images (Desclée de Brouwer, 2004), Sur le Film (Macula, 2016), Primitive souls. Celluloid, plush and paper figures. (Quodlibet, 2023). He has written several articles on the relationship between cinema and the visual arts. He has been curator of several exhibitions, including Comme le rêve le dessin (Musée du Louvre/Centre Pompidou, 2004), Le mouvement des images (Centre Pompidou, 2006), Nuits électriques (Musée, de la photographie, Moscou et Laboral (Gijon, Spain) 2007, Tapis volants (Villa Medici, Rome et Les Abattoirs, Toulouse) 2010, Beat Generation (Centre Pompidou, 2016), L’œil extatique : Sergueï Eisenstein à la croisée des arts (Centre Pompidou-Metz, 2019), Le reste est ombre(Centre Pompidou, 2022).