Les archives dans les mains des cinéastes

The Cinémathèque québécoise invited five artists of experimental and animated cinema to make a short film using unused Soviet films donated by collector François Lemai. Recomposing the images, manipulating the shots to recall their plastic value, producing a discourse that resonates with the approach of the artists called upon…
It is with this in mind that director Theodore Ushev rearranges Eisenstein’s The Old and the New with aesthetic vigor and panache, giving it a new historical dimension, with the old becoming the USSR and the new Putin’s Russia.
For her part, Austrian-Canadian experimental filmmaker Michaela Grill revisited themes from her later films (the disappearance of species, the environmental divide) by rearranging images from Soviet dystopian fiction.
Under the title La dureté du mental, Charles-André Coderre, a young filmmaker and performer associated with the Montreal group Double négatif, offers a reworking and plastic alteration of Soviet sports films from the 1980s depicting wrestling and pole vaulting.
Finally, two films question the cinematic landscape and
its intimate function. Canadian-Bulgarian filmmaker Ralitsa Doncheva achieves this by reusing a 35mm copy of an unfinished film by Alexander Sokourov. Steven Woloshen, for his part, takes a very personal and contemplative approach, rephotographing in 65mm the landscapes of some shots from the film Les tziganes montent au ciel, by Moldovan-born director Emil Loteanu.

Guillaume Lafleur
Director of programming, distribution and publications Cinémathèque québécoise