Article
Originally appeared in The New Vulgate 5.25.11
http://newvulgate.blogspot.com/
Alice in Wonderland
(Introduction written for the premiere at The Microscope Gallery 5/7/11)
by James Fotopoulos
Let me preface by saying that for me attempting to describe any of my work is a difficult process. The approach I take is as someone that has pursued his own path in attempting to merge both practice and theory through a highly personal labyrinth of curiosity and whatever knowledge I have obtained through the act of filmmaking itself. So I come to this discussion not from the outside, not from the intellect alone, but from the point of developing my ideas though the peaks and valleys of actual production. I often fail to fully understand exactly what I have intended or what I was doing with a piece until years after it is completed. Only then can I look at it with some sense of cold distance. But even then, the reality that I have frozen a period of my life is always apparent and it often becomes a process of painful re-examination. When I look back on my very first films, I often say to myself: “This was made by another person.”
I find with every film there is an alchemy that is part of the creation, where every aspect of my life is influencing what is being done from start to finish. I feel that, at least for now, three main factors come into play: the first is a personal primordial element – which is furious and somewhat out-of-control. This emerges completely from a personal, emotional and psychological terrain and has to be harnessed into a structure. Second, there is the language of the medium’s history, and then finally the current technology that I am dealing with. I separate this last element from the second because the way in which I am trying to discuss it here, it’s more what the market is forcing on you at the moment. For example, I sense a return to optics that was sort of subdued over the last ten years, most likely because of the quality of high-definition. So this is more trying to process and understand, if possible, the very rapidly changing tools. This might level out and change more slowly in upcoming years.
• Christabel – Method
In the early 90s I became interested in the Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem “Christabel.” What immediately appealed to me were the stylistic shifts of the poem’s two parts, and the fact that the poem itself was incomplete and had two “conclusions” at both endings. The unusual rough structure of the piece combined with the primal subject matter and themes offered me a challenge with which I could use video to explore the organs, tissues and skeleton of the piece’s body – in a way performing a surgery, to not merely adapt another person’s work, but to return it to a contemporary relevance using modern tools. I tend to think of this as restoring a certain level of emotional tension or a trigger back to a place of unknowing or re-learning. The approach is to create rules of juxtaposition between elements within a set structure during the planning of the production. This structure once in place can induce conflict between the different elements involved during the execution. The structure if properly balanced both provokes and harnesses the ensuing chaos. Often the technology itself provides this or even the budget (or lack of). If successful, the perception achieved can be one of thrusting a largely recorded and written history of a medium back into a place of the unknown.
In this case the subjects directly influence the forms. The subjects are destroyed or fractured during the various stages of production and key pieces are collected and then unified. These pieces = images, sounds and so on, then repeat and vary, creating hopefully a strangeness in perception. I try with all my work to be completely inclusive, letting everything in, and not pushing things out, then modifying and shaping it all to fit as one. So the work is a cluster of fragments or little appendages – sometimes this may be messy or strange, but these appendages or capsules contain a combination of history and personal psychology playing off each other. With this, I can understand what has remained the same throughout history instead of what is different = which I feel is most important in attempting to understand life and death.
By letting in everything, I mean the problems of production, the complexities introduced by actors, people showing up late, issues that arise from problems with technology, but most importantly, issues that come from the subject itself that may pose an awkwardness in the medium’s grammar or form, so instead of cutting elements out I prefer to solve a way to keep them in – everything that the act of throwing a film into production has to offer. This interlocking of the variations and problems of subjects and forms and taking all these elements and making them into a unified whole, is, if successful, a whole which may appear simple, while the act of making it and the ideas at play may be complex.
I remember when I made my first film ZERO in 1995 and I showed people scenes I had cut together, not only did everyone have a different interpretation of an image in a sequence, but also a different perception of that image after it repeated or was slightly varied. This for me at 18-years-old was a very freeing moment. It in a sense allowed me to unleash myself creatively with no sense of fear.
With all this being said, there is an unconscious unknown aspect to the process, which is directly related to the personal psychological ingredient I mentioned before. This mystery is the very core element of that first primordial factor. Without this personal root I couldn’t work myself up into that force of will power required to fracture and unify all the other external subjects. One may call this a style or maybe themes that wind through a body of work. But whatever it is, it seems to have more control over me than I have control over it – an out of control force, which I try to trap and structure. This can account for the same images or sounds I seem to gravitate towards in my work over the years, or how I shoot, edit, the colors I choose and so on. It is this emotional power combined with my rational self, trying to shape it into an evolving historical grammar of the medium.
When I made my third feature film Back Against the Wall, I thought I had made a film completely different from my two prior features. (I still tend to think this way about every new film I make) Then when I saw it, I thought “I could cut this into the other two prior films.” This realization seems to always occur when I see something I’ve made over the years, whether it is sound pieces, films, videos or drawings. I’ve accepted that as a human I exist in a decaying cube of compressed time, repeating and working on the same visual and sonic landscape. Life is so brief that everything can be learned in a microcosm and only a few personal images are needed to create (And now with the internet this takes on a whole new dimension of continually unfolding information on an inward plane). For example, I can ask myself – “why the frozen face image?” in all my films. Recently an art professor in Philadelphia mentioned this to me after watching a number of my films. She noted this image reoccurs frequently. And I have no answer other than – I have gravitated to that for so long so naturally – it seems to me like a portal – the open mouthed face – a portal of all life and death. But this also, as I will mention later in Alice, due to the personal need for that image, the reworking of it over the years, the neutralization of it – can serve as a visual portal to transmit themes of the chosen subject it is brought to. Like an alien object laid in front of a swirling river of fractured ideas which then pass through it.
• Alice – Origins
In 2003 I was invited to an opening of an art exhibit and while wandering in the museum’s lower level, I stumbled upon a Lewis Carroll photography exhibit. A number of images struck me in what at the time they were created was probably perceived as amateurism and how now in the 21st century, this sense of the amateur was erased. It evolved into something completely different and not just because the technique used was unique, fragile and antiquated – but I felt a certain level of mastery in the repetition, construction and choice of the images. This fusion of both amateurish approach and mastery was at the heart, from my own experience, of the creative process – in a way the territory of the artist and his personal space – through this perception, this sense of the uncanny that I mentioned earlier is revealed. A line is created through time that emotionally connected me to the past (I had a similar sense of this when I saw Chaplin’s The Circus and I could see very clearly the makeup on his face and it filled me with a strange sense of horror) – revealing the similarities of the human experiences of the past – and through the images, sounds, colors – the ever present sense of decay and death.
To illustrate, in 2007 I made a film Sleep Weep (The Zookeeper) where I show an image of a rabbit painting by Albrecht Dürer and then a shot of text stating: “This painting erased thousands of years.” In an interview I did about the film I was asked about the use of terror footage – I made the comment that I think Caravaggio would have used beheading footage if he were alive today. Again, the strange line I was speaking of that moves through history, revealed through the grammar and the new technologies. To emphasize this point further in the film and underline our preoccupations with similar thematic obsessions throughout audio-visual history (and touching upon real versus staged footage and the evolution of this with video) – I chapterize the piece with Edison’s films of the electrocution of Topsy the elephant, a cockfight, the beheading of Mary Queen of Scots and the execution of Czolgosz. Again = what has remained the same. But I leave the full issues and ideas of that film for another discussion.
The image from the Carroll exhibit that left the greatest impression on me was of actress Marion Terry dressed in chain mail, standing in front of a thick blanket hung against a brick wall. The hanging of the sheet had the strongest affect on me. Perhaps it was because it was something I have done myself over the years. I could somehow relate to the simplicity of the act. In the past I always obscured the sheet – turning it into a black void through the photography. But upon seeing this sheet so crudely hung something was stirred up and brought out that I had been playing with = doing away with the pretense of hiding it (with Alice I would return to hiding it with only selected parts revealing the hanging sheet, revealing the truth). My first attempt specifically with this type of exposure was in a 2004 video I created titled The Pearl.
There were no direct references to the image in that piece, but it manifested itself in an unpolished performance-based public-access approach. Realizing that the perception of something transmitted would be perceived visually, in a completely un-transmitted manner at a not too distant future date, created a deliberate artifice – a deliberately “dead” work using the very much “alive” aspects of performance. The perception would be one of a bodiless sculpture – in a similar way with the photographic evolution as I mention above – the former a dead synthetic object and the latter a dead synthetic performance. In a couple of short videos I made in 2007, direct reference to the sheet image is made using digital paint software and CGI figures.
As with most of my work, fragments of images or pieces of stories and characters will linger in my mind for years and then slowly but suddenly come together into a structure. This was the case when I read about the Henry Savile Clark and Walter Slaughter 1886 opera of Alice in Wonderland: A Dream Play for Children. Around this same time I grew tired of using digital images and animations. I had been drawing in a traditional manner mainly with graphite and charcoal. I say “traditional” because I always considered the act of drawing a larger root of the creative act. For example, drawing can occur within composition, structure, and construction of various media – more of an overall hand-eye-coordination and for me the root of all creative intelligence.
• The Drawings
Drawing in the manner with which I had been doing for the last few years – a combination of the figurative, abstract, scrawls, cartoons – an overall exaggeration or caricature – and blending all these modes together – had become a kind of foundation of all my creation. And so finished drawings, sketches and plans were blending together. Because I work mainly in film and video – which are highly conceptual by their very nature – I tend to think of my work and process as a pyramid, film and then video being at the more evolved tip, and at the base, were the drawings.
In Alice the drawings occur during the songs from the 1886 musical and act as anchors of the original musical. More so, they are the personal seeds of the video itself, since they are of the Carroll photographs I first saw in 2003. In the video they follow Carroll’s chronology. Each song has an even number of drawings of the photographs and then variations of the photographs fractured into drawn abstractions, which fall in-between the figurative drawings.
As I stated earlier, I had no interest in actually using pre-existing visual images themselves – whether photographs, found footage and so on. I felt my own wholly synthetic interpretation and creation of an image, in this case the drawings, had to be made in order for the use of the photographic images to have any relevance in trying to create a unified work. I felt if it was seen or heard, it shouldn’t be seen or heard again. Even if performed or previously recorded or documented, it should not be re-created or restaged. At this point in history that is creatively bankrupt. I would not even manipulate a pre-existing image through a technological advancement, such as film by way of video or with computers. It had to be a creation within space. This personally meant for me returning to the very base of my creativity: drawing figurative images. This would in a sense relate to the three main subjects of the piece – Carroll, John Ruskin and Thomas Eakins – and both their actual creation of and ideas on drawing itself.
Now, with this being said – I have made a great deal of work doing these very things I am talking about turning my back on. I also like a great deal of work like this made by others. But for me, by the time I made the video The Ant Hill in 2004 I felt, for example, that we can all see sex so easily the image meant nothing for me – it had to be real or a whole new way of communicating it – a new symbol. The same went for violence – especially now with the Internet and the availability of death images. Children could access these images and it would affect the way they saw the world. This was something new being introduced into the grammar. Therefore, “re-creating” or “acting out” these actions meant little. It was like child’s play never elevating itself to the level of art.
• The Music
The music appears in three tracks or layers. The first – is the score from the original 1886 musical. I had tracked down an original copy of the manuscript and had it photographed. I asked Ben Hanna of the band Grandpa’s Ghost, with whom I had worked on a number of projects over the years, if he was interested in taking on the music. I knew that he had the discipline needed to put the time and effort into reinterpreting it. I also knew he would work with what was there, remain respectful to the score and the subject matter and not intentionally pervert it. I assumed, correctly, he would rework it with a feel of both an American folk sensibility and electronic element, while retaining the core of the original. And most importantly we discussed trying to achieve the slickest and most polished soundtrack we could get.
The second layer features the parts between the original passages. Here I discarded the play and wrote my own text. I then gave this to the noise band ONO. I had been working with them the previous year on a project in which they had done test recordings for me. I knew their interpretation of my script would be more ambient, more of a soundscape than the original score, but not fully – there would be concrete elements buried within. I also knew that the way they recorded it would be done live, most likely in one take – rough and murky. They would leave in all the imperfections of a live performance – which greatly appealed to me. I also knew it would be dominated by the singer Travis’ voice and persona. This was a contrast or variation to Hanna’s voice in the original score. So I gave ONO instructions and the duration I needed the piece in and let them record it. They gave me a recording that I was very impressed with – it was extremely raw, very sparse and primal. Two of the musicians in the band Rebecca Pavlatos and Shannon Rose Riley, asked me if they could record additional parts and do a mix of it. At first I hesitated but then agreed because I wanted to hear what they would do and I’m not one to censor anybody. The new mix they handed me I used in the final piece and it would actually serve as a sonic-link to the third layer. Shannon adding additional instruments and vocals cleanly over the murk of the original recording created a middle ground between the Hanna and the Nate Archer music – the final layer.
I needed something that could fill in the gaps between the Hanna and the ONO music – in a way, to create a foundation, the primal ooze of the piece. I had worked with Nate Archer in the past and he had given me a number of CDs. One was from a film of his brother’s Wild Tiger I Have Known where Nate did songs. The other discs were of long noise performances. One of the things I liked on the Tigers soundtrack was how he achieved something that was in-between a movie music soundtrack and clean atmospheric sound effects. This same feeling appeared in other longer pieces, although in those he leaned more toward music, where these movie-type elements crept in from within the pieces or wrapped around them. I discussed the project with him and he supplied me with material, but he was in Bali or someplace and there was an issue with the CDs so he sent these early mixes of the pieces I wanted and they were very savage sounding – which I loved. It added a third critical type of recording that had no polish to it at all and that could exist in a sense – between the cracks.
• Text
The Alice video uses more text than anything I have done. For many years I used no text at all, not even credits and my early films had very little dialogue. But I began to create videos consisting of heavy dialogues, usually between two characters, and often the text was spoken through voice software. By 2007 I began to use actual text in the videos such as Ty Cobb and Tape 1. This probably was as a result of my increasing focus on writing in the films (or the figurative nature of the drawings).
In the case of Alice dealing with a video that was a balance of music, an actress, video images, drawings, sculptures and having much of that stemming from the various subject’s writings – I felt the perception I aimed for worked best in communicating all of this by having a viewer feel the various stimuli all at once – hearing music, hearing the lyrics, seeing the images and also reading the words. And this being a piece that deals in content with the work from the machine age, but created with tools of an information age, I imagined the words like digital hieroglyphs projected on a wall – information on a surface that was not a page or a stone – but words on a moving screen on the side of the building you would see on the street – like a modern pyramid.
• The Acts
Discussing my work is a difficult process because the force to make it is somewhat unexplainable. It always exists to some extent in the moment and I seldom look back at past pieces. The root of the process is in a way a constant exploration of my life, an endless evaluation shrouded in an always looming sense of death from the moment I wake till the time I sleep – a sense of it physically in my body, combined with some type of underlying rage, a furious sense to move forward at all cost. So when I get into the making of a piece, one element will spawn many other elements – like a giant web. Also many of the decisions I make take their own path and perhaps years to take shape. But it is never “inspiration,” it is simply work, working everyday like a machine and this spawns further ideas.
Often it is difficult for me to predict when all the various pieces come to a point and it is the right time to begin a project and spin it into a whole. It is like a thousand shifting plates in my mind, moving fragments of ideas, sliding together, being worked like a muscle around me and sometimes enough of them slide and fit together enough for me to begin. But it is also very easy for me to take something, or come into something, or be asked to do a project and trigger it all into action – this is about having command over the different levels of the process – the blend of the slow moving idea-stew that comes together over time and the lethal precise implementation of the craftsman-skills that one develops making work.
I stated earlier how a number of these shifting plates started the process of Alice in Wonderland. Now as I have said when I initiate a project more and more doors start opening – one thing leads to another. In the case of Alice the combination of subjects lead me to Carroll’s friendship with John Ruskin and his book The King of the Golden River which inspired the Alice books.
I explored Ruskin’s writings on art and his own drawings. From that thread I moved into my own drawings, into Carroll’s photographs then into Thomas Eakins as a whole. His use of the camera, which I felt was in many ways similar to Carroll’s in what could be seen as amateurism combined with a sophisticated construction of scenes within a private personal space. Much of this a result of new tools colliding and merging with the previous older creative techniques or culture, such as using the camera as a painter in both setting and execution and how that exposes the personal space of the artist in a new way, using the camera in the creation of his actual painting by photographing and then projecting onto canvas, isolating and editing parts of the images and tracing. This process is a creative investigation that multiplies the ideas one threads together – like pulling all the pieces through the eye of the pin – into a unified piece.
Now, when I say “amateurish” I am in a way juxtaposing this against a contemporary sense of professionalism in the industries of film or art. “Amateur” is an aspect of the creative process that is always present, even in the most allegedly “professional” situations. There is always an attempt to have it masked and denied or completely crippled and destroyed. The ruthless sanitizing of it has been going on for a long time, but it always remains and leaks out both in the relationships involved and in the execution of production and it should be embraced. It gets more exposed at certain periods of intense transition = as with the camera in the hands of the painter at the end of the 19th century or currently the film production in the hands of the person with a website online.
Let me try to summarize what I focused on in the acts themselves:
In the first Act, I focused on Ruskin and his The King of the Golden River and by the end the Act evolved into ideas about his drawings and then into the work of Étienne-Jules Marey. Here I took the moving image – for example birds or cats dropped in front of a sheet – and instead of reinterpreting them through a drawing – I did it through a sculpture.
My sculptures first emerged through special makeup effects I did for my early films. Over the years I shaped the method into what you see in Alice. For me, it is in a way another foundation of my process that hovers slightly above the drawings in my personal creative hierarchy. These appear in the sections of the video where I use my own text – the sculpture is a compliment to the drawings. This compliment within the space of the video, as opposed to the flatness of the drawn images, functions as synthetically reinterpreted balance.
In the Second Act, I focus on Eakins and Eadweard Muybridge. With Eakins as the subject the process becomes easier in a sense, because his methods were somewhat akin to my own. For example, he made casts, sculptures and wax dolls, photographed models in his studio, fragmented images and so on. Therefore the subject allowed a much easier breakdown and unification into a final form.
Now some of these creatures, as well as some text, are completely my own creation and not references to the pre-existing works at all. They sprung from the working process or were unlocked from my mind from something I read, from listening to the music or a combination of these things. And if I felt they fit into the overall piece – I used them.
When I thought of the idea of a musical and what that could be in relation to the 19th century images progressing from painting into photography and then into moving images all within the studio space or the private work space I was brought back to the original images and ideas of Carroll’s photographs that started all this – the idea of the private space, the tension and relationships that exist within it and what associations they can trigger. How in that space the professional dissolves and fades away no matter how much one pretends to put on a mask of professionalism, and in a sense always returns to what could be the personal relationship of amateurs. That inevitable breakdown in the minds of many on the outside, can lead to problems such as the model and the photographer or painter in the Eakins’ studio or the nude painted children of Carroll. Here we have the personal human tension stemming from the principles involved in the creative act and then followed by the public’s perception of the artist themselves. Both of these individuals were condemned – Eakins I feel far worse than Carroll and in a more complex way – for his actual methods of production would come into question. In the case of Muybridge, he killed a man.
Now some of these creatures, as well as some text, are completely my own creation and not references to the pre-existing works at all. They sprung from the working process or were unlocked from my mind from something I read, from listening to the music or a combination of these things. And if I felt they fit into the overall piece – I used them.
When I thought of the idea of a musical and what that could be in relation to the 19th century images progressing from painting into photography and then into moving images all within the studio space or the private work space I was brought back to the original images and ideas of Carroll’s photographs that started all this – the idea of the private space, the tension and relationships that exist within it and what associations they can trigger. How in that space the professional dissolves and fades away no matter how much one pretends to put on a mask of professionalism, and in a sense always returns to what could be the personal relationship of amateurs. That inevitable breakdown in the minds of many on the outside, can lead to problems such as the model and the photographer or painter in the Eakins’ studio or the nude painted children of Carroll. Here we have the personal human tension stemming from the principles involved in the creative act and then followed by the public’s perception of the artist themselves. Both of these individuals were condemned – Eakins I feel far worse than Carroll and in a more complex way – for his actual methods of production would come into question. In the case of Muybridge, he killed a man.
I also think a certain level of exhaustion set in – mentally and physically. On the set of my 2007 video The Sky Song I felt a great physical strain and illness by the whole production. After this my way of working became very isolated from the outside world. But through this sort of isolation I questioned a great deal of what I had been doing. I began drawing heavily and reorganizing a manner of working that I felt was a way of figuring out what happened at the very root of the failed productions. And I mean this by trying to solve the problems at the very core of filmmaking itself and not trying to patch the problems over with money or an infinite delegation of creative power – which I felt was an excuse.
In 2009 I finally had enough. I drew a line and went back into a mode of working and writing that I had not done in a number of years since my first four or five feature films in the 1990s. Much of this was the total focus on completion of many of my projects I had backlogged for many years. Alice was the first of these I embarked on. I think of them as small films, micro-films or sparse-narratives to varying degrees, some more narrative than others.
June 2nd, 2011
Recurring Dreams
“CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER,” said Alice, although I can’t remember exactly where. Was it after she’d fallen down the rabbit hole or when she crossed to the other side of the mirror? No matter: Alice in Wonderland (2010)—James Fotopoulos’s adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by way of Henry Saville Clark and Walter Slaughter’s 1886 musical Alice in Wonderland: A Dream Play for Children—is an extremely curious object in its own right, and its premiere New York screening is a must-see. If you doze through a few of its ninety-nine minutes, your dreams will be the better for it.
A prolific Chicago-based underground filmmaker, Fotopoulos created a stir with his stupendously creepy feature Migrating Forms. It screened in 2000 in the New York Underground Film Festival, which subsequently renamed itself by borrowing the film’s title. The concept of “migrating forms” has remained a constant in Fotopoulos’s work: In Alice, it applies to the fragments of John Tenniel’s illustrations for Carroll’s Alice books and the bits of Carroll’s prose and poetry that migrate to Fotopoulos’s movie, along with excerpts from the score of Clark and Slaughter’s opera. One might view the slow dissolves between the hundreds of drawings that Fotopoulos created for the film as another layer of migration; so too is the mix of the nineteenth-century score with droning metal–art music that sounds as if it’s erupting from the bottom of a swamp.
Alice is a multimedia opera presented in the form of a single-screen movie. In terms of avant-garde genres, it could be classified, to borrow a term from P. Adams Sitney, as a trance film. At the center of the proceedings is a medium close-up of a very beautiful young woman who appears in two guises. In Part I (subtitled “Alice in Wonderland”) her dark hair curls about her face and is held in place by a white housemaid’s bonnet. In Part II (subtitled “Through the Looking Glass”) her hair is blonde, long, and straight, swept away from her forehead in the manner of Tenniel’s Alice. Although her face almost never changes its expression, it seems very much alive, thanks to the talent of the actress and Fotopoulos’s filmmaking. One fully believes that the drawings (most of them charcoal-shaded outlines on a coral ground), which cross-fade seemingly in front of her face and behind her head, are projected from her psyche. As in many of Fotopoulos’s movies, the narrative is couched as a stream of consciousness. The drawings—most of them of body parts, strange animals, whiskers without a cat, a long-eared rabbit head cut off at the neck, a terrifying featureless face, and other less legible organic forms—evaporate before they can be fully grasped, as do the single words and phrases that pop onto the screen in varying sizes of white typeface, punctuated before they can accumulate into a complete sentence by the word “pause,” always placed, as if it were a stage direction, in parenthesis.
And, occasionally, we see a long shot of Alice I and Alice II superimposed on the close-ups of their respective faces. At one point Alice I slow-dances alone, and the undulation of her torso is among the most erotic images in cinema. Alice II is pregnant, which certainly would have taken Carroll aback. I wish Fotopoulos hadn’t tried so hard in the last ten minutes to reach a conclusion with texts that are foursquare on the meaning, unlike anything that came before. I had hoped that the last text on-screen would be “pause.” Instead, in the movie’s only bow to convention, it’s “The End.”
- Amy Taubin, Artforum
May 9th, 2011
kagablog
december 12, 2010
alice au pays des merveilles (2010) un film de james fotopoulos
ayant adoré son long métrage « des formes en migration » (migrating forms) de 1999, nous avons contacté récemment le cinéaste américain james fotopoulos qui est d’origine grecque. fotopoulos avait montré ce film ancien au nyuff (new york underground film festival) en 2000 et la même année aryan kaganof y montrait son « nostalgia for the future ». le cinéaste important james fotopoulos nous a envoyé lui-même son dernier long métrage « alice au pays des merveilles » d’après la pièce musicale du même nom de henry saville clark et walter slaughter. l’origine de cette pièce est bien sûr le roman classique de lewis carroll.
ce nouveau long métrage de fotopoulos est une adaptation originale de la pièce, une adaptation sur la problématique de « l’interaction entre l’amateurisme et le professionnalisme« , d’après les mots de la jaquette. en jouant avec les tableaux vivants de sa belle actante (plutôt qu’actrice) et avec les 245 peintures de thomas eakins, le cinéaste aimerait aussi mettre en avant ses moyens modestes qui riment parfaitement bien avec la liberté artistique et avec la nouveauté. le film est divisé en deux actes (pour utiliser un terme d’opéra qui conviendrait avec le film en question) et son actante est accompagnée à quelques plans d’intervalle par des figures « humaines » macabres habillées en gazes, proches de l’univers de jan svankmajer. sauf que dans ce film ces figures ne sont pas animées mais accompagnent l’immobilité expressive de la jeune femme. une inscription sur l’image nous assure que « ce que je fais, je le fais pour impressionner ».
l’œuvre originale de carroll a été écrite sous l’emprise de l’acide. dans ce film, l’acide cinématographique est très doux et très indépendant des paroles récitées par une voix masculine. ces paroles sont sous la forme d’un flux langagière incessant qui remonte notre curiosité de connaître une version nouvelle, une version fraîche de perfection poétique à travers la simplicité de la mise en scène et l’interaction éternelle entre le cinéma et la peinture.
pendant le deuxième acte la femme est habillée en blanc mais il n’y a pas de neutralité stylistique. dans tout le film la vision du cinéaste est pleine de passion visuelle sur le jeu délicat et discret de l’actante.
la temporalité est non-linéaire et cela serait en accord avec les mots de la jaquette écrits par le cinéaste que cette pièce ancienne « prouve l’interaction entre la science et l‘art». fotopoulos aurait probablement imaginé un temps indéfini de l’histoire narrative ou cinéphilique, le même temps qui remonte au début du cinéma mais qui trouve son écho lointain aujourd’hui la tentation d’ « avant-garde rétro » (pour utiliser une notion contradictoire).
une phrase de carroll qui nous a marqué dans le film et qui pourrait compléter le sens du film dit: « l’humain est devenu invisible ». c’est pour ça que son actante est peu mobile, comme un esprit immatériel. c’est un esprit en cours de préparer ses rêves et ses mouvements
pour révéler les points communs entre fotopoulos et nous-mêmes, je tiens à vous préciser que la musique additionnelle vient du groupe rahdunes de nate archer, un cinéaste commercialisé en dvd dans le passé par le « cinéma abattoir », la même société qui avait édité mon film « pandrogeny manifesto » dans sa deuxième compilation.
écrit par dionysos andronis
Link to Article
December 23rd, 2010
