Kurzfilmprogramm: Avantgarde und Frühes Kino

Keynote by Christian Lebrat and Prosper Hillairet and films

Intermittences non régulées d'Étienne-Jules Marey // Jean-Michel Bouhours. FR, 1978, 16mm, b/w, 14 min

Sécan ciel // Jean-Michel Bouhours. FR, 1979, 16mm, color, 4 min

Autoportrait au dispositif // Christian Lebrat. FR, 1981, 16mm, color, 9 min (18B/sec)

Trama // Christian Lebrat. FR, 1978-80, 16mm, color, 12 min

D'Art moderne // Dominique Willoughby. FR, 1977, 16mm, color, 9 min

La Petite Fille // Pascal Auger. FR, 1978, 16mm, color, 9 min

Ultrarouge Infraviolet // Guy Fihman. FR, 1974, 16mm, color, 31 min

In France in the 1970s, a group of filmmakers around the distribution cooperative Paris Films Coop and the magazine Melba (1976-1979) became part of a new movement that Christian Lebrat called "post-structural cinema". They set themselves apart from their predecessors, who created structural works, by defining film as a predetermined process that should be brought to its maximum intensity. Their cinema dispenses with all narrative and inscribes itself incessantly into every moment, like individual machines that function through interweaving and fragmentation ("image-éclat" - image splinters). Whereas the avant-garde of the 1920s, with Germaine Dulac and the concept of movement or Jean Epstein and photogénie, tended to refer to the cinema of the Lumière brothers, French post-structural filmmakers wanted to reinvent cinema by referring to its origins: to the first cinematic experiments of Étienne-Jules Marey, for example, as well as to the precursors of cinema (zoetrope, 3D experiments). By experimenting with means such as fragmentation, repetition, multiplication and color in their cinematic work, they were able to increase the potential of cinema. (Prosper Hillairet/Christian Lebrat)

Photo: Austrian Film Museum