Animation Off-Limits: Optic Nerves
The 12 films presented offer a meeting with some of the major names in experimental cinema and their psychedelic worlds.
Twelve films to immerse you in the world of experimental cinema with techniques including flashing lights and light games, projections, breathtaking movements, optical distortions or the questioning of photographic representation. Such names from this experimental world as Tcherkassky, Ito, Knapp, Bokanowski and Pawlowski, generally absent from animation festivals, will be standing side by side in this programme.
To kick off the show is Man Ray's The Return to Reason, one of the founding films of avant-garde cinema, followed by The Banner of Youth, a sort of UFO in the impressive filmography of Borowczyk and Lenica as well as a dynamic little film that brings together the traditions of "found footage" and cameraless animation.
The concise and concentrated nature of the above two films seem to encapsulate the seeds of the rest of this programme. In some of the films we can pick out certain images, methods, effects, quests... The Return to Reason heralds at the same time Dream Work by Peter Tcherkassky and Jordan Baseman's short Galaxy, Here and There by Andrzej Pawlowski and Réflexion by Sylvie Trouvé, as well as Scintillation by Xavier Chassaing and Patrick Bokanowski's Flames.
In the midst of all this, Alexei Dmitriev's Abstract? imposes a question with its programmatic title: what is abstraction and, as a consequence of it, what is representation?
Marcel JEAN
CITIA