Gérard Courant
"Les Malheurs d'Émile Cohl" shows the ravages of time on the copy of the film "Les Chapeaux des belles dames" which Émile Cohl shot in 1909. Slowing down the most damaged parts of the film from the father of the animation, Gérard Courant has succeeded in creating an object with abstract shapes and, paradoxically, in giving another life to Cohl's work." --Courant
Filmed with a telephoto lens, from the heights of the village of Priay, the four pressurized water reactors at the Bugey nuclear power plant in Saint-Vulbas. The village and its bell tower in the foreground was where, as a child, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry spent his holidays.
One of Courant's many "Carnets filmés", filmed on November 7, 2021 in the botanical garden of l'Arquebuse in Dijon. The film is a slow exploration of this space, created in 1833 and rich in around 3,500 species of botanical plants.
"Every Good Friday, since 1980, I film the ceremonial of the Stations of the Cross of the Passion of Christ in Burzet, in an isolated village in the Ardèche, where the inhabitants, for seven centuries, dress up to celebrate and perpetuate this religious rite. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Burzet's 2021 Passion of Christ Ceremonial has been canceled. To compensate for this cancellation, I tried an experiment..." Says Alain Paucard of the film: "Courant reworks the images, passing from realism to a sort of expressionism which, enlarging the line, warms it."
"(Daniel) Petit Lu" is a film which celebrates Petit Beurre by the Nantes company LU. The title of the film is a pun between the actor - Daniel Petit - and the famous Petits Beurre. In "(Daniel) Petit Lu", Daniel Petit devours small butter in a biscuit choreography and to the tunes of advertising songs from the 1950s extolling the taste qualities of Petits Beurre LU.
"Autour de Vent-Pire" is a documentary recounting the shooting of "Vent-Pire", the vampire film that Gérard Courant shot on November 12, 1970 at the Porte du Diable in the Pasques forest in Plombières-lès-Dijon.
"Ave, Patrick Topaloff !" is a film that parodies an advertisement for Bahlsen candy bars sold in theaters during intermission. The protagonist of this advertising parody, which we hear in the soundtrack of the film, is singer and radio man Patrick Topaloff.
A film poem by Gérard Courant to the glory of nine women submerged in the waters of the Mediterranean Sea.
Placed under the auspices of the philosopher Gaston Bachelard whose maxim "The human being has the fate of flowing water", is quoted in the epistle of the film, La Femme qui pleure dans les nuages is a film-poem by Gerard Courant to the glory of nine women engulfed in Alpine and Pyrenean torrents.
The action of "Le Jour où la Terre s'éveilla" begins 4 billion 540 million years ago ... at the time of the formation of planet Earth. This formation lasted 20 million years. The film lasts 12 hours and is composed of 1,080,000 images. Each image of the film corresponds to 20 years of the life of the Earth. Every second of the film corresponds to 500 years of the life of the Earth.
"L'Hôtel-Dieu de Lyon" is, in a subjective camera and in a single sequence shot of about twenty minutes, an exploration of the former Hôtel-Dieu hospital in Lyon. Located on the western edge of the Rhône and near Place Bellecour, the Hôtel-Dieu was rehabilitated and converted in 2018 into a luxury hotel and shopping malls. The film runs through all the inner courtyards of this huge building. The film is dedicated to François Rabelais who, from 1532, was a doctor at the Hôtel-Dieu in Lyon.
"Le Départ de la 3ème étape Lagnieu-Oyonnax du Tour de l'Ain 2017" is an episode of the Carnets filmés by Gérard Courant that the filmmaker shot in Lagnieu, in the starting village of the Tour de l’Ain cyclist, where around a hundred professional riders come together from all over the world.
"Le Départ de la 2ème étape Ambérieu-en-Bugey-Saint-Vulbas du Tour de l’Ain 2017" is an episode of "Carnets filmés" by Gérard Courant that the filmmaker shot in Ambérieu-en-Bugey in the departure village of the Tour de l'Ain cyclist where around a hundred professional runners from all over the world meet.
À travers l'univers à la Cinemateca Portuguesa de Lisbonne (June 22, 2017) is an episode of Gérard Courant's Filmed Notebooks shot during the retrospective of his films at the Cinemateca Portuguesa in Lisbon. In this episode of the Filmed Notebooks, António Rodrigues, programmer of the Cinemateca Portuguesa and Gérard Courant present to the public the session of Through the Universe.
On 6 December 2013, a public exhibition dedicated to her memory, Bernadette Lafont l'exposition hommage, was held in Paris. Actors Stéphane Audran, Guillaume Gouix and Alexandra Stewart read some extracts of Bernard Bastide's new biography Bernadette Lafont, une vie de cinéma, including some original letters written by Bernadette. The event was filmed by Gérard Courant and aired as an episode of Carnets filmés, In Memoriam Bernadette Lafont.
"Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet" is the overlay of two Cinematons by Gérard Courant with Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet: "Jean-Marie Straub, Cinématon number 342" and "Danièle Huillet, Cinematon number 343," filmed on May 27, 1984.
Les Deux Lyon is, in a subjective camera and in a single sequence of just over an hour, a wandering through the city of Lyon that begins from the hill of Fourvière and its basilica to end on the other hill in Lyon, that of Croix-Rousse. Between these two peaks, the film sinks into Old Lyon by taking the chemin des Rosaires, the ascent (in the direction of the descent) of the Chazeaux, crosses the Place Saint-Jean bordered by the cathedral of the same name (in the process of renovation), then runs along the Palace of Justice (hidden in part by a palisade due to work), The journey continues through the rue d'Algérie, the famous Place des Terreaux with its town hall and museum of fine arts, rue Puits Gaillot, the slopes of the Croix-Rousse with its multitude of steps and stairs that lead us to the Plateau. The film ends on the esplanade of Boulevard de la Croix-Rousse and the Gros Caillou of glacial origin that is climbed by children.
The 195 streets in alphabetical order of La Croix-Rousse a famous district in Lyon.
A fusion of two Cinématons to celebrate the day of experimental cinema in Samawah, Iraq.
In 2004 and 2005, I made a filmed inventory of the streets and squares of Saint-Marcellin, in the Dauphiné. This movie is called: Across the Universe. In this film, each street and square was filmed in a single sequence shot and each of the plaques for these streets and squares is placed at the beginning of each street and square. In order to offer a maximum of views of the city, here is Les Chutes de Saint-Marcellin, an appendix to Across the Universe which is made up of shots that were not retained for this film but which deserve to be kept and shown.
This distinctly personal journey into the artistic possibilities of independent film is not to be missed. Jonas Mekas, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Robert Kramer and many other visionaries and mavericks of the silver screen – as well as a book seller, a critic and a psychoanalyst – discuss what cinema has meant to them, what it is and what it could be and, implicitly, how it has changed over the 18 years in which this film was shot. Director Boris Lehman leads the charge, drawing in moments of absurdist humour and inventive camera work; he keeps things raw and spontaneous. His encounters with the now much-missed Jean Rouch and Stephen Dwoskin are particularly touching and stand testament to their personal playfulness and candour. An engaging, absorbing, epic odyssey of a movie.
Every year since 1980, I have filmed the Good Friday ceremony reconstructing the Passion of Christ in Burzet, a remote village in the Ardèche area, where for seven hundred years, the local people have dressed up to celebrate and perpetuate this religious rite. (Gérard Courant)
Madrid, a stroll in the Spanish capital with Joseph Morder followed by the snowstorm that paralyzed the Paris region on December 8, 2010.
A simple, modest and faithful record of some moments at the Lucca Film Festival in October 2010, with songs and speeches by Abel Ferrara: trace of the co-presence of two of the greatest contemporary filmmakers, dissident and true sons of Cesare Zavattini’s revolutionary spirit.
A cinematographic logbook around the mythical island of Alicudi in Sicily.
A cinematographic logbook around the mythical island of Alicudi in Sicily.
Strolling through France (Roanne, Nice and Carcassonne) with some excursions abroad (Munich, Montreal, New York).
"On the occasion of the premiere of Nel Regno di Napoli in Cannes in 1978, Werner Schroeter gave me an audio interview about this film and about his work in general. Our meeting took place on the terrace of the Hotel Majestic, in the midst of excitement of the Cannes festival life, a few days after the screening of Nel Regno di Napoli and in the presence of the photographer Jean-Claude Moireau. Vivre à Naples et mourir is the audio capture of that informal meeting that happened on 20 May 1978 and which is, as per director's wish, more like a casual conversation than an interview in the strict sense of the term (a set of questions and answers).
"Inventaire filmé des rues et places de Lyon avec des noms d’universitaires" presents all 92 streets (as well as the alleys, avenues, boulevards, courtyards, dead ends, and passages) and the 14 squares (as well as the squares...) of Lyon that have university names.
A cinematographic logbook around the mythical island of Alicudi in Sicily.
BB X 20 is the compression of 20 films starring Brigitte Bardot, released between 1952 and 1970. Every film is reduced to 25 times the original length, resulting in approximately 4 minutes. BB X 20 is an absolutely complete compression: this anthology devoted to Brigitte Bardot doesn’t miss a single shot of the original films ! The work, presented in chronological order beginning with 1952, the year she first appeared on screen, slowly reveal the creation and transformation of Brigitte Bardot into an icon.
A wandering in the various districts of Dresden a martyrdom city of the Second World War.
On the occasion of the 7th meetings of Digne, Pour un autre cinéma, organized by Pierre Queyrel and which presented a retrospective of Philippe Garrel's cinematographic work, this film is the sound recording of the discussion that the filmmaker made with the audience after the screening of his films Marie pour mémoire, Athanor, Voyage au jardin des morts and Le Bleu des origines.
Travelling through kms of concrete and urbanisation before reaching the ocean.
Notes Lyonnaises II (April 4, 2007 to October 20, 2010) is the second of the four episodes of the Carnets filmed that the filmmaker shot on the sidelines of Lyon, autopsie d’une grande ville. These Notebooks are essentially composed of unpreserved shots and notes filmed according to the filmmaker's wanderings in the city where cinema was invented by the Lumière brothers.
Courant registered Garrel’s dialogues in order to produce his first urgent film, the first of his essays inquiring the state of current cinema. As a synthesis for the 20th century, Garrel invoked his relationship with Freud, Henri Langlois, Orson Welles, Marx, The Rolling Stones, Godard, Warhol, Picasso and Bergman and draw a territory in that different kind of cinema also inhabited by Courant’s art. Four years later –as a sequel, and a first example of Courant’s series– there was another meeting with Garrel, where again the filmmaker adds names related to his sensitivity, such as Murnau, Von Stroheim, the Lumière brothers, Abel Gance, Polanski, Rivette; the writers André Breton and Gabriele d’Annunzio; and the actresses Anna Karina, Nico, Zouzou and Maria Schneider –three stars of his films. (Diego Trerotola)
From and back to the Place d'Arcy in Dijon, we travel through the city of his childhood.
"Compression de À travers l'univers" is the reduction of my film À travers l'univers from 1 hour to 18 minutes into a 4-minute movie. The film is "compressed" like a work by Arman or Caesar. But unlike the work of these artists who compressed usual objects, this self-compression reduces a purely artistic object. The tour de force and the bet of Compression de À travers l'universe was to make a total compression: in this film, there is no lack of a single shot of the original film!
Promenade through the district of Bercy in the East of the city of Paris.
Through the Universe is the third section of my cinematic series Mes Villes d’Habitation (My Dwelling Towns). The film represents the autopsy of Saint-Marcellin, a small village in the Isère Region where I spent my childhood during the 50s. Through the Universe displays, in alphabetical order, all the 127 streets and 17 public squares of the town (updated to the period of the shooting, in 2004-2005), all shot following the same rules: in a 20-second-long wide, static, single shot. Every vista is preceded by the sign indicating the name of the street or plaza.
"A Debate Across the Universe" is, on the one hand, the capture of the debate which followed the world premiere screening of my film "Across the Universe", presented as part of the "Ethnology and Cinema" in Grenoble, at the Les Méliès cinema in Saint-Marcellin and, on the other hand, the criticism of this debate and additional information relating to the staging of "Across the Universe".
Trying to describe oneself is a movie about representation. How it is possible, through film, to describe oneself and describe others. With the camera as mirror and third eye. At first, a collage-like combination of letter-writing, investigation and journey, something between documentary and feature film. Finally, a portrait of Boris Lehman from 1989 to 1995, part II of BABEL.
Between 1980 and 2003, Courant registered the annual reconstruction of the Via Crucis in Burzet, a lost town in Ardeche, where the locals dress up every Holy Friday to celebrate and pursue this religious tradition that began centuries ago.
The fortuitous meeting of two women to the identical first name, Lucy, who formerly loved the same man, Jonathan, induced, in this film, of the polysemous variations on the memory, art, and the difficult relationship between creation and emotional life. Dehumanized by an exclusive artistic practice, the man lost his reference marks little by little. "Lucy en miroir" wants to be, also, a shifted and transverse second reading of "The Contempt" ("Le Mépris") of Godard, by a step more plastic than analytical or conclusive.
Les Deux Lucy is a short documentary portrait of the shooting of Raphaël Bassan's film Lucy en miroir. It's the opportunity for us to look at one of our contemporary filmmakers and important film critics of what we call in French cinémas differents, meaning a different way of making films. Our making of offers the opportunity to follow, step by step, the making of this short film with scenes shot on the set, and to listen to comments by the filmmaker about his work.
Notes Lyonnaises I (October 29, 2002 to November 2, 2006) is the first of the four episodes of the Filmed Carnets that the filmmaker shot on the sidelines of Lyon, autopsie d’une grande ville. These Notebooks are essentially composed of unpreserved shots and notes filmed according to the filmmaker's wanderings in the city where cinema was invented by the Lumière brothers.
15 years through Le Bois de Vincennes - The "before" and "after" 1999 storm destructions.
A film about an ongoing cinematic adventure that began in 1978: a vast anthology of personality portraits called Cinématons, dealing with people in the arts. Historical, ethnological, sociological and psychological, this anthology is a living record of the artistic community of the last 20th century which attempts to answer these questions: Why film everyone? Why choose cultural personalities? How do the subjects look at their image? How much exhibitionism and narcissism is involved in being filmed?
Encore Cinématé ! is a fake Cinématon by Gérard Courant, the author and designer of this famous film series. It is not part of the anthology and is therefore out of collection. However, he has all the characteristics of an official Cinématon but the filmmaker, who had just lent himself to the cinematon game a year earlier, on the occasion of the 2000th portrait of his collection, did not want to overload his fetish series with new portraits of him. He preferred not to integrate it while ensuring that this portrait has a real existence, that it is visible and that it is a film in its own right.
A documentary about Luc Moullet and the mountainous locations that feature in his films
30 years after their artistic revolution, members of the Zanzibar group meet in 1999 in Saint-Sulpice Square in Paris (France) in front of Gérard Courant's camera.
Amours décolorées is a cinematographic poem to the glory of Mariola San Martin, model, stylist, dancer and Spanish photographer.
Coude à coude is an episode of Gérard Courant's Filmed Carnets that follows Velo Love (July 1 to 3, 1996), in which journalist and screenwriter Alain Riou proposed to the filmmaker to accompany him by bike on the course of the mountain stage of the Tour de France, Chambéry-Les Arcs.
"Ponts routiers de la Seine à Paris" is a film series that shows, in a single fixed, wide and silent plan all the bridges (and bridges) that span the Seine in Paris. (Rail bridges and motorway bridges on the ring road are excluded). The bridges are filmed in order, from upstream to downstream. The camera is placed on the left bank and films towards the right bank.
A bicycle race is held every year in a pass of the Alps called Parpaillon. With the energy of a skillful cyclist perhaps as a great tribute to François, the mailman played by Tati in The Big Day, Moullet makes a comedy by pedaling at a pace that allows him to reinvent the possibilities of film gags. La Cabale des oursins is a guided tour to the northern France, transformed into a Geography lesson in the pataphysical style of an Alfred Jarry disciple.
Series of areas that are dear to him(Morvan, Bugey, les Aples, Vivarais,…etc.). Shots taken while driving from his car, holding the camera with his right hand without looking through the viewfinder while I driving withf his left hand.
Every year since 1980, I have filmed the Good Friday ceremony reconstructing the Passion of Christ in Burzet, a remote village in the Ardèche area, where for seven hundred years, the local people have dressed up to celebrate and perpetuate this religious rite. (Gérard Courant)
Every year since 1980, I have filmed the Good Friday ceremony reconstructing the Passion of Christ in Burzet, a remote village in the Ardèche area, where for seven hundred years, the local people have dressed up to celebrate and perpetuate this religious rite. (Gérard Courant)
Every year since 1980, I have filmed the Good Friday ceremony reconstructing the Passion of Christ in Burzet, a remote village in the Ardèche area, where for seven hundred years, the local people have dressed up to celebrate and perpetuate this religious rite. (Gérard Courant)
Every year since 1980, I have filmed the Good Friday ceremony reconstructing the Passion of Christ in Burzet, a remote village in the Ardèche area, where for seven hundred years, the local people have dressed up to celebrate and perpetuate this religious rite. (Gérard Courant)
Every year since 1980, I have filmed the Good Friday ceremony reconstructing the Passion of Christ in Burzet, a remote village in the Ardèche area, where for seven hundred years, the local people have dressed up to celebrate and perpetuate this religious rite. (Gérard Courant)
Every year since 1980, I have filmed the Good Friday ceremony reconstructing the Passion of Christ in Burzet, a remote village in the Ardèche area, where for seven hundred years, the local people have dressed up to celebrate and perpetuate this religious rite. (Gérard Courant)
Every year since 1980, I have filmed the Good Friday ceremony reconstructing the Passion of Christ in Burzet, a remote village in the Ardèche area, where for seven hundred years, the local people have dressed up to celebrate and perpetuate this religious rite. (Gérard Courant)
Two young girls meet, Reinette from the countryside and Mirabelle from Paris, and decide to take a flat together in Paris where they attend University. Four successive stories about their daily lives illustrate the very different views, characters and relation to the world of these two friends.
Poetic sci-fi film as an homage to Cinema, Cocteau, Goodis and to American B-series of the 1940s. Constructed exclusively on photograms in black and white and freely inspired on Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville.
Le Passeur immobile, which covers the year 1987, is a Booklet filmed stuck between The Days and the Nights (1986) and The Artifice and the Fake (1988). These Notebooks have been punctuating my activity as a filmmaker for about fifteen years. They are like a life parallel to my other films and film series (Cinema, Group Portrait, Read, etc.). They are also like a letter to the spectators.
A diverse group of guests gather in a small hotel in Paris to contemplate the state of their lives in this pretentious drama. Joseph Goldman (Fernando Rey) is a washed-up Hollywood actor making a living in the dinner-theater circuit. Accompanied by his wife Sarah (Carole Regnier), Goldman meets Frederique (Berangere Bonvoisin), who is hiding from her former lover. French financier Arthur (Fabrice Luchini) hopes to get into the film industry and bends the ear of a British director (Michael Medwin). The talkative film has little action, and none of the characters evoke much interest or resolve their dilemma.
Portrait de groupe is a film series of filmed portraits that shows all kinds of groups gathered under family pretexts, friendly or professional, in a single fixed, wide shot (style: family photo) and silent of 3 minutes and 20 seconds.
Gérard Courant films the routes of his voyage in Greece with a Super8 camera. Reflections, waves, ports and landscapes are edited at a dizzying pace; in their midst, portraits appear of a very beautiful woman, along with images of the director who turns the camera on himself, showing his face reddened by the sun.
The story about gladiators against a German background. One of them, Ettore, has become a star of the underworld. He ends up breaking down, caught in a role he can no longer fulfill. His last betrayal is to spill the beans to the press. –São Paulo International Film Festival
The shooting diary of a film shot in France and in the United States. Using photos of Paris and of New York City, excerpts of his former films, statements by friends of his and shooting sequences of the film itself, tormented filmmaker Marcel Hanoun has made a heterogeneous and unclassifiable film about the difficulty of filming.
Every year since 1980, I have filmed the Good Friday ceremony reconstructing the Passion of Christ in Burzet, a remote village in the Ardèche area, where for seven hundred years, the local people have dressed up to celebrate and perpetuate this religious rite. (Gérard Courant)
"During the invitation to a film festival in Thessaloniki, Greece, where I presented the Cinématon and my feature film Blue Heart (which won a prize), I filmed the daily life of the city. The seafront, the university and the city where I was staying."
Every year since 1980, I have filmed the Good Friday ceremony reconstructing the Passion of Christ in Burzet, a remote village in the Ardèche area, where for seven hundred years, the local people have dressed up to celebrate and perpetuate this religious rite. (Gérard Courant)
A Ciné-poem – An impressionist ballad in the early 80’s.
A song of love to the city of Genoa. The film wanders the streets of the city center and explore the beautiful cemetery and then climb the hills which offer an amazing view over the old town crossed by a highway and port.
Every year since 1980, I have filmed the Good Friday ceremony reconstructing the Passion of Christ in Burzet, a remote village in the Ardèche area, where for seven hundred years, the local people have dressed up to celebrate and perpetuate this religious rite. (Gérard Courant)
Two New York women, Kristin and Doreen, live a black and white life, but in color of Gene Tierney, a star of 40’ Hollywood melodrama, while listening to the old songs of Marilyn Monroe. They go from one extreme to the other (from dream to reality, from day to night, from black and white to color), and so travel symbolically through this timelessness. Kristin disappears and Doreen is lost is the big city. Her meetings with Marcel, a filmmaker, then David, a sculptor, accomplish nothing, and she is destroyed by daylight. But her Memory of Gene Tierney triumphs over night and death, and Cinema can continue.
Portrait of "cinéaste" Ruiz, seemingly at his typewriter, in Courant's ongoing "Cinématon" series.
Dominique Paini's portrait by Gérard Courant (1980 - silent).
Every year since 1980, I have filmed the Good Friday ceremony reconstructing the Passion of Christ in Burzet, a remote village in the Ardèche area, where for seven hundred years, the local people have dressed up to celebrate and perpetuate this religious rite. (Gérard Courant)
"In this journey, Courant's heroine wanders through the clouds and Pyrenees mountains way after the world's destruction [...] Songs by Brigitte Bardot, Marilyn Monroe and Leonard Cohen, scores by Vivaldi, Kraftwerk and Johan Strauss, they all form this eclectic and defying musical atmosphere from which Courant dreams about a point of view that would allow him to find a rhythm in a constantly changing abysmal paradise" -Diego Trerotola
Surroundings of the Canal Saint-Martin’s in Paris, a popular district where modernization is just about to begin.
Legendary drag performer Ocaña in performance with a cardboard Marilyn on the west side of the Berlin Wall.
Early portrait of Ossang in Courant's ongoing "Cinématon" series.
Un sanglant symbole is two films: the film of the image and the film of the voice. The film of the image was shot before the film of the voice. The film of the image is the reproduction of 160 photographs (of films, advertisements, news ...) filmed in variable durations (more and more slowly, then more and more quickly). What do we see? Looks. Hand gestures. The film of the voice is not a comment. Neither a voice-over: in no way does this voice have such a status and even less the character of an exhibit for a better understanding of the film. On the contrary, she perverts, disturbs, worries.
"This is the story of a search, that of a woman in pursuit of her own identity. This woman, Marie-Noëlle Kauffmann, ventures into the world of representation, meets four characters who, each in their own way, give her a key to cross the five sequences/initiations of the film which are all benchmarks that she must absolutely cross to have an answer to the question: Can cinema help find a lost balance?" -Gerard Courant
La Grande Famille by René Magritte in different sizes superimposed, animates the dove and gives an impression of continuous flight.
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.
One year before starting his famous series "Cinematons", Gerard Courant had made an ancestor to this series: the portrait of Martine Rousset, filmed with a Bolex 16 mm mechanical.
Gérard Courant applies the Lettrist editing techniques of Isidore Isou to footage of late 70's pop culture. Courant posits that his cinema offers an aggressive détournement to the French mainstream, reifying a Duchampian view of film: "I believe in impossible movies and works without meaning... I believe in the anti-movie. I believe in the non-movie. I believe in Urgent... My first full length movie that is so anti-everything that I sometimes wonder if it really does exist!"
1300 meters from the arrival of the 13th stage Carpentras-Orcières Merlette (192 kms), then, in the Col de Sauze, the 14th stage Orcières-Merlette-Briançon (201 kms) of the Tour de France 1972. Filmmaker Gérard Courant photographed Eddy Merckx (yellow jersey), Cyrille Guimard (green jersey), Luis Ocana (white box combination), Lucien Aimar, Lucien Van Impe, Joachim Agostinho (Portugal champion), Felice Gimondi (Italian champion), Raymond Poulidor, Karl-Heinz Kunde, Leif Mortensen, Bernard Thévenet. The stage of Orcières-Merlette was won by Van Impe ahead of Agostinho and Merckx and that of Briançon by Merckx in front of Gimondi and Guimard. This clip is an excerpt from the first episode of Gérard Courant's "Carnets filmés" entitled "Aurore collective".
"Rêveries d'un escaladeur solitaire" is a tribute to "Goupi Mains Rouges", the film Jacques Becker shot in 1943 during the Occupation. The main character of "Rêveries d'un escaladeur solitaire" which takes over the role of Tonkin from Becker's film, played by Robert Le Vigan, is perched on top of a tree. Out of the picture and shouting his hatred of society, he contemplates and insults the members of the Goupi family, sitting at the foot of the tree, who implore him to come down from his observation post.
"Le Fantôme des Arcades" is the story of a series of appearances of a ghost, performed by Christian Clément, who haunts the Corcelles-les-Monts plateau in the Dijon region. The ghost appears several times in front of a mushroom picker, played by Daniel Petit, terrified by these multiple appearances.
A few moments after the arrival of the first stage of the Critérium du Dauphiné 1970, Roanne-Chalon-sur-Saône (224 kilometers) which has just been won by the Belgian Daniel Van Rijckeghem ahead of the Dutch Jan Janssen (2nd) and Marinus Wagtmans (3rd). Filmmaker Gérard Courant photographed Raymond Delisle (yellow jersey), Luis Ocaña (final winner), Gilbert Bellone, Lucien Aimar, Roger de Vlaeminck (Belgian champion), Jan Janssen (green jersey), Harm Ottenbros (world champion), Jean Dumont, Marinus Wagtmans, Raymond Poulidor, Georges Chappe on the song "Poets" by Léo Ferré.
The film shows this place where the author was a resident from January 4, 1966 to July 31, 1967.
A New World is an inventory of 112 streets, roads and alleys (first part) and 14 squares and squares (second part) of the Bois de Vincennes in Paris.
Gérard Courant's "Filmed Diary" of December 14, 2011, produced in Dubai (United Arab Emirates). Between December 7 and 15, 2011, Gérard Courant was invited by the Dubai International Film Festival, in the United Arab Emirates. It was an opportunity for him to film many "Cinematons" of personalities from the Arab world and to continue his "Film Notebooks" from which he brought back 7 episodes.
