online video
ET PATATI ET PATATA
programme
This slightly old-fashioned French expression conjures inexhaustible chitchat, or a sequence of words which one cannot guess at. The more pictorial equivalent of an etc. (et cetera). The static or dancing figure of the scarecrow and the puppet dialogues with the double figure and establishes strange internal atmospheres.
Louise Hémont
Cavern (Mutant Stage 5), 2016, 4 mn
Production : Amélie Couillaud / Casoar, dans le cadre de la série Mutant Stage pour Lafayette
Anticipations (Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette).
An expedition into a cave to penetrate its recesses and cavities and breathe in its draughts of air. A ritual in the making for dancers who fit in with each other.
Marie Hendriks
No FLy Zone, 2016, 9 mn 49
No Fly Zone presents Henri Dupuis, a scarecrow/museum watchman character, inside the reserves of the Museum of Natural History. The straw watchman is standing with his arms stretched out between two rows of display cases where an army of stuffed birds is arrayed. Unable to turn his head to keep an eye on the collection of stuffed birds, he tosses his pupils from one side of his eye sockets to the other, like two small balls in a ping-pong game. Apart from his eyes and the camera’s movements, nothing moves in this museum, asleep beneath a thick layer of dust. Trapped in a tragic-comic dilemma created by his contradictory double role, the scarecrow watchman shows a loyalty to his position verging on the absurd. MH.
Léonard Martin
Yoknapatawpha, 2016, 22 mn 43
Yoknapatawpha. The name is impossible to pronounce. Its syllables express authority. They enjoin silence. What god left his last letters here? Is it because it designates an accursed land, stolen from the Indians, that this degraded tetragram struggles to hide its still water?
Yoknapatawpha, a fictive place invented for the needs of his art by the American writer William Faulkner, invites to take an infernal plunge into a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Yoknapatawpha. What if, for a moment, the river suspended its flow and let us hear the voice of that troubled spirit, the silent child Benjy, for whom, need we recall, space and time are one?
Beyond the senses, it is there, once again, that the equivocal is to be summoned – that which has several voices. Here is another attempt to pull the puppet-strings of the teeming images, to suggest a gesture in the torpor of the indeterminate. LM