JEANNE D’ARC, POLANSKI ET TOUS LES AUTRES
Pauline Horovitz
Pauline Curnier Jardin
La Saison Vidéo is offering carte blanche to Pauline Horovitz who has chosen to invite Pauline Curnier Jardin.
Because she has the same first name as me. Because she wears the same glasses as the ones I had in the 1980s. Because one day a critic told me: “Your Joan of Arc side disgusts me”. And above all else, because her work is brilliant, funny and sensitive; and in addition, she sings wonderfully. Pauline Horovitz
Pauline Horovitz
Tout a commencé par le sourire, 2006, 3 mn
Production: ENSAD
A self-portrait made using an inventory of more or less imaginary physical shortcomings. This is my very first video. The medium which never attracted me. I thought it was reserved for people who film flowers growing, or the wrinkles of their bodies in close-up. I had started out with a project involving Pop Art sculpture, the enlargement of dental mouldings, and I’ve ended up talking about my tooth and knee problems. With another video which I made at the same time (Les appartements, The Flats), for the first time I started telling stories using “I”, without remaining in a kind of impressionistic blur as in my first pieces (which were exclusively acoustic). For me, it was unthinkable to say “I”, because it’s bad language, a shocking kind of behaviour. In it I have found my tone, my diction, and a way of storytelling. It’s almost a manifesto: everything looks true but a lot of things are false. It’s an “I” which refers to the experience of one and all. PH
Un jour j’ai décidé, 2007, 6 mn
Production: ENSAD
An evocation of a middleclass upbringing with all its clichés, as they are handed down from mother to daughter. I worked on ready-made idioms and expressions. PH
Polanski et mon père, 2009, 8 mn
Production : Quark Productions & Arte France
My father says that the best profession is either being a doctor or a lawyer. I am a filmmaker. And this is the first time that my father has agreed to be filmed. This video marked a new stage in my work, which included directing a (non-professional) actor. This is the first appearance of the character created by my father, an academic on the moon, a sort of variant of Mr. Hulot. PH
Mes amoureux, 2010, 5 mn
Production : Quark Productions & Arte France
How is it possible to produce an effect of recognition in the spectator through a personal experience? How can one present the archetype behind a specific incarnation (the provincial town of my childhood, etc.)? From a banal reality I have tried to pull out “model-images” of sentimental despair, referring to shared experience: for example, the cinema as a place where teenagers are on the make (here, comic and melancholic all at once, because the movie house is disused), filled with those universal characters the handsome kid, the athlete, the bespectacled intellectual etc. PH
Pauline Curnier Jardin
Ah ! Jeanne, 2006-8, 21 mn
Co-production : Abbaye de Maubuisson - ENSAD - ENSAPC - Conseil Général du Val d’Oise - Conservation Départementale des Musées de la Meuse.
Ah! Jeanne/Oh! Joan was firstly, in 2006, an “expanded film”, a performed film in which I display my rushes on several screens the way you pose a problem and its possibilities in space. I dwell on risqué details, I recount the ellipses and pitfalls of a first bizarre shoot, sing prologue songs and weep because I do not understand my leading character, Joan of Arc.
Today, Ah! Jeanne/Oh! Joan is a film. Five sequences of films “emerge” like more or less luminous ideas, in the manner of a free and personal way of thinking about Joan of Arc. In the film I play a possible double of Joan in the present and seem to envy my subject’s consciousness, which is slightly more alterable than the average one. These sequences, in which my ancestors and friends play their own characters, all make reference to history and sexuality, borrowing different film languages, and mixing documentary style and fantasy, farce and pure portrait, with each one of these genres showing the many different intellectual, historical and fantasized interpretations associated with the multi-layered meanings of the character of Joan of Arc. PCJ
