Klossowski, peintre-exorciste

Balkan Baroque is a real and imaginary biography of the Yugoslavian performance artist Marina Abramovic. Rather than a mechanical reproduction of the artist's work, the film tries to create a new reality by translating the performances into cinematographic images that intensify the fictional context of the film. Abramovic plays herself, but ,appearing in multiple forms, blurs her own identity. Memories and fantasies intermingle with day to day rituals. The chronological narrative often breaks to reflect the interior voyage of the protagonist from the present to the past and back to the present. The result is a visually impressive film. Balkan Baroque had its world premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, 1999.

A film about the controversial Belgian multidisciplinary figure, known for his theater stagings, his choreography, his ballpoint pen art, and even bicycle racing. This fictitious portrait projects Jan Fabre into his own imaginative universe and composes a character who changes ceaselessly identity, plays numerous roles under the most varied disguises; behind a mask, still another mask… The female character, like a ‘demon of passage’ using different faces, haunts the male character and inspires his metamorphoses, ad infinitum.

“Fictional” reconstruction of the chain of mental images that make the visions of the photographer Jean-Luc Moulène appear.

A fictional process. An amorous relationship in the process of falling apart? A semblance of narrative, a sketch of diegesis, the fragments of an encounter between a man and a woman: an 'encounter of the crossing', marked by return, splitting, distance. Indecisive attitudes suddenly suspended or contradictory, toneless voices. Figures, and not characters. The figure is this form that approaches and frees itself from the notion of character, which reduces presence to a borderline state and ruins representation. The figure strays from the real. This obliteration and ambiguity of the figure signal the vagueness of the subject, the loss of its unity, a relationship to the world of order and enigma. The figure as a simple appearance, a mental projection.

This series, assembled in a film, presents the singular view of contemporary artists on major works of art history. The words of these free spirits make each work see each work as a dynamic form, in the process of becoming, crossed by multiple energies. The artists' voice-over narration frees the creative possibilities of the image - sound and image playing with each other, animated by the same spring: what is seeing?

Pierre Coulibeuf's experimental fantasy.