Christian Lebrat
This film is part of the Twenty Puccini Project."A cellist freely interprets a few famous themes from Puccini's La Bohème. A camera films the musical "performance" from very close up. Shot in a single take, the point is not to tell a story, but to attempt to render the pure moment in which music emerges and an image is formed."
Filmed at night, with no manipulation. The hypnotic effect of the image, composed of abstracts motifs, in dialogue with the enigmatic sound track, ponctuated by micro-sound events.
"I found that soundtrack abandonned on a shelf in an editing room. It had been hanging about there for a few weeks before I decided to listen to it. There you are, carefully cellotaped in the correct order of the editing rushes, claps, cuts and wrong frames of a film I don’t know anything about. That soudtrack immediatly appealed to me. Its discontinuary and fragmentary aspect, nevertheles made sense, was a sort of transcription in the world of sounds of what had been so for visual in my other films. Moreover, its contents made of sentences or scenes only just introduced or repeated, of questions about identity and the body, the coming in and out of the characters, scenes of seduction and violence, all that mixture permanently interrupted by the unknown director that give his orders : "Ready ! Motor ! Action !" in short, all this gave the film a mysterious and imaginary atmosphere." Christian Lebrat (Dedicated to Marcel Duchamp)
"In the 1990 text on his film Autoportrait au dispositif (1981), Lebrat wrote that all his films are in fact self-portraits, including those that are abstract colour films, and the Rothko's painting are the most beautiful examples of self-portraiture in twentieth century art. lebrat notes that the impetus behind self-portraiture comes out of his desire to create another image of his body, which does not necessarily have to be its representation but can suggest another satte of being, for example the infinite and transcendent state aims at overcoming the problem of corps morcelé and mortal flesh." Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof
"Christian Lebrat said he thought of Monet, who painted with the series Water Lilies colors ‘at the edge of the visible;’ those of Holon indeed display colors so intense, so enraged with energy that they release in a pure way the performative, exclamative character, the character of act which, in a more or less underground way, informs every image." Nicole Brenez
"A city, its crowds; crowds processed on film then transferred to video. I used a technique particular to video to manipulate a vertical section of the image sideways, changing both its shape and color density. Each operation was repeated a number of times, in a series of consecutive incrustations. The final image was achieved in a few hours, entirely by hand (or, more precisely, by hands), like an impromptu musical improvisation. The rhythm, the flux of the city confronted with video's scanning composition and compression." (Christian Lebrat)
"In Trama, Lebrat divides a surface vertically to be filmed in six equal segments of color (yellow, red, blue, green, violet, orange). The composition stays exactly the same all the way through the film. The filmmaker puts a band on the side of every two or three frames. Constructed step-by-step, using ten bands, the optical mixture of color induces strange pulsating effects." Raphaël Bassan
The densest film of the divided-frame group is the aptly titled 1978 Networks, which includes as many as 20 exposures of the same roll of film. Here only one slit was used, but Lebrat combines within one image many narrow strips taken at diverse Paris locations, sometimes seen through colored filters. The enclosed, even claustrophobic space of the strips contrasts with Lebrat’s superimposition of them and with the movement within the strips and by the strips within the frame... (Fred Camper)
First works with pure color. The slits are organized into vertical Yellow-Red-Blue strips which move laterally across the screen according to a pre-calculated order.
In Organisation II, the vertical colored strips (red, yellow, and blue) whose height matches that of the screen move laterally while flickering on and off.
Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.
First works with pure color. The slits are organized into vertical Yellow-Red-Blue strips which move laterally across the screen according to a pre-calculated order.
To come back to abstraction, I have a feeling that colour varies in my work between two aspects: the colour-object that comes from the sensation of an object, in this case the film strip, and the opening. This colour-object permits the transporting of objects into space, to explore the space of the screen in the theatre; this is what allowed me to develop Liminal Minimal (1977) by enlarging the space of projection with two projectors and, taking into account that the vertical strips evolve on a black background comparable to the darkness of the theatre, I was able explore the whole space of the projection with the coloured strip
Anamorphoses of television images combined with fragments from Jerome Bosch’s Garden of Delights painting.
For the films in which Lebrat divided the screen he placed a piece of paper with one or more slits in it in front of the lens, allowing only a narrow strip of imagery to register. He then exposed the film multiple times, layering images. The initial effect is confusion—it’s often hard to identify from these moving slits what we’re seeing. But soon the eyes acclimate, and when one does recognize fragments of a nude woman (Lebrat’s wife) in a landscape in Film Number Two (1976), she has the quality of an apparition. Shown in a different way than thousands of years of nudes have led us to expect, this woman is charged with a vital, surprising erotic energy. (Fred Camper)
Very little was left of the film by Anne Prat, a brilliant student who studied cinema with me at the University of Paris in the 1970s. Anne Prat was not just any student. Three weeks before summer break in 1976, even though she had not taken part in any of practical lessons, she presented a short film, shot in the Brakhage style, which surprised all of us with its technical mastery. She informed me she was going to stop studying and go to Australia, and that her film was just the beginning of a larger and more complicated cinematographic work. She had left me the material for her film at the university, in a big box, and asked me to pick it up. At that time, I had no idea I would never going to see her again… (C. L.)
V5 (Zip-Zap) progresses via a tight, interweaving montage of rapid sequences, which were filmed directly from a CRT TV screen.
Swallowed in the emptiness with a dull and gloomy noise, the face gradually vanishes with a recurring rocking motion.
Filmed unexpectedly on the port of Genoa, the jazz music resonates with the lights of the city. The video loop, multiplied and worked on during the editing, induces in the spectator a kind of spatio-temporal hypnosis reinforced by the light patterns that change status and the "depth" of the sound recorded live...
