Robert Cahen

Twins still in their amniotic fluid announce our human condition, our compulsion to walk, move forward, run. When everything moves, we go through the forest of emotions in a dreamlike way. But it is thanks to water and its light reflections, to its transforming power that the infinite “Kosmos” plays with our uncertainty.

In this vivid transposition of contemporary music for television, Cahen "responds" to the complex musical transitions of Répons, a work by French composer Pierre Boulez. Performed by the Ensemble InterContemporain and conducted by Boulez, the intricate Répons was designed for an ensemble of twenty-four musicians, six soloists and a "real-time" digital processor. In Cahen's re-composed interpretation, he responds with visual and temporal transformations, "opening" the images in space and time and applying electronic techniques to engulf the instrumentalists in ocean, sky, and trees. Mirage-like superimpositions, temporal shifts, mirroring effects and de-synchronization result in a rhythmic confluence of the illusory and the real. Immersing the viewer in image and sound, Cahen mirrors the transformative process of Boulez's music.

No synopsis available yet.

The light creates the motion. The film uses black and white as a way to to reveal things. Something is happening here linking death, love and pleasure. Appearance, disappearance, the rhythm of breathing revealing the passing of time both binds and releases our feelings.

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.

A contemporary dance video and a tribute to Patrick Bokanowski. The choreography of Bernardo Montet, conceived and created to be filmed by Robert Cahen, is based on the music of Michèle Bokanowski. It speaks of the loneliness of the dancer in the centre of the stage.

Twins still in their amniotic fluid announce our human condition, our compulsion to walk, move forward, run. When everything moves, we go through the forest of emotions in a dreamlike way. But it is thanks to water and its light reflections, to its transforming power that the infinite “Kosmos” plays with our uncertainty.

Twins still in their amniotic fluid announce our human condition, our compulsion to walk, move forward, run. When everything moves, we go through the forest of emotions in a dreamlike way. But it is thanks to water and its light reflections, to its transforming power that the infinite “Kosmos” plays with our uncertainty.

In this vivid transposition of contemporary music for television, Cahen "responds" to the complex musical transitions of Répons, a work by French composer Pierre Boulez. Performed by the Ensemble InterContemporain and conducted by Boulez, the intricate Répons was designed for an ensemble of twenty-four musicians, six soloists and a "real-time" digital processor. In Cahen's re-composed interpretation, he responds with visual and temporal transformations, "opening" the images in space and time and applying electronic techniques to engulf the instrumentalists in ocean, sky, and trees. Mirage-like superimpositions, temporal shifts, mirroring effects and de-synchronization result in a rhythmic confluence of the illusory and the real. Immersing the viewer in image and sound, Cahen mirrors the transformative process of Boulez's music.

No synopsis available yet.

The light creates the motion. The film uses black and white as a way to to reveal things. Something is happening here linking death, love and pleasure. Appearance, disappearance, the rhythm of breathing revealing the passing of time both binds and releases our feelings.

A contemporary dance video and a tribute to Patrick Bokanowski. The choreography of Bernardo Montet, conceived and created to be filmed by Robert Cahen, is based on the music of Michèle Bokanowski. It speaks of the loneliness of the dancer in the centre of the stage.

Small piece of life in the streets of Ho Chi Minh.

"Chili-Impressions" is the diary of a journey made by Robert Cahen during his stay in Chile in 1987. Like flicking through the pages in a notepad, the images constantly superimpose themselves and always seem to spring from a place beyond memory: the wind, the river, the rails, which carry them to the source of the impression. The journey never stops, it returns more distant still, until the jogging of memory caused by the simple power of these fleeting scenes suddenly gives a sense of place, of place in this world.

The images of this short film are linked to the concrete music by Michel Chion, and let the monologue of Saint Antoine (Pierre Schaeffer's voice) unfold and offer itself completely. The imagery, presented in parallel pictures, is intended to be earthy and close to nature, rediscovering, when necessary, the material which is offered in a metaphor surrounded by mists. At the sound of the gunshot, concrete in the music, occurs this break in the discourse, and the image, like this gunshot, finds the Asian connotation of death. And the dream raises the human form, then a face which offers itself before disappearing in the tumults of an imaginary sea. The earth seen from the sky then the sky itself take us very far (Robert Cahen)

A portrait of Karine from birth to six years in black-and-white film and photographs.

Experimental film

A film by Robert Cahen and John Borst. A woman passes through Hong Kong after dark.

J.M. Tringaud photographed the sea. On the day of the summer solstice 1990, 12 bottles, each containing an original photo are cast into 12 seas and oceans around the globe. In a kind of melancholy chant, Robert Cahen takes us across the solitude of these giant oceans where occasionally a lighthouse provides a human dimension.

About “Four Doors” André Bon writes : these doors open onto four soundscapes which express in the order : tension, relaxation, expectation, ecstasy. We say : Sign. Symphonic breathing in four movements where music and sensuality of the images are offered in counterpoint, by subtle shifts. Small story of an encounter to decipher.

No synopsis available yet.

Short film.

"L'invitation au voyage” is articulated around the combining of images of memories. On a technical level, this is obtained by using fading photographs followed by solarised landscapes produced using the universal special effects device developed by the research department of the ORTF (the French national radio and TV broadcasting corporation) and a scene filmed in slow motion using a high-speed camera operating at 200 frames per second.

A film by Robert Cahen about funereal observances and the songs of those left behind.

It was in 1973 that this film, the first film shot in Super 8 mm with magnetic sound, was broadcast on television. The Carnival of Basel is famous for the music of its fife-and-drum military bands. The imaginary quality of the carnival comes face to face with musique concrète.

No synopsis available yet.

L'Eclipse, is composed as a visual little poem using light, colour, rhythm, to present a universe that is half celestial, half cerebral, in which graphic grids play with disappearing and setting suns. Robert Cahen creates effects of fire, clouds, steam, that contrast with the regular and geometric structure of the image.

"It's in the idea of movement where, for me, something essential comes together/ combines-- Seven short poems write to each other in images, fleeting visions of China glimpsed through sights, through sounds, always moving." -Robert Cahen.

A film by Robert Cahen

Once a year, the city of Pisa is lit up by thousands of candles for an age-old religious festival. Magic, visions, dreams and light...

A Japan where time stands still; Men and women bound to their land and their work; Bodies floating in thermal springs, shown through the eyes of a painter. The traveller has understood that "everywhere it is difficult to live" and tries to make a picture from real things, so that, through the act of painting, he no longer suffers. Inspired by the characters in Sôseki's novel "Pillow of Herbs", these references give a free interpretation to the images, so that we make the journey in search of temporary solace.

Temporary landscape; visual and sonic messages; blended; the city. Part of the "New Spaces" project, the film is an exploration of the landscapes and sounds of Hong Kong, seeking its identity between the old China and the new.

From "That was..." to "...Did we go there?" The Antarctic approached, observed, scrutinised, analysed, displaced. Questions about reading the landscape, reading motion; A slow motion journey through memory, as if "to have the time at last to know."

A film by Robert Cahen.

No synopsis available yet.

The concept of "things half seen" determined the meaning of this film. Hidden scenes, barely revealed, follow one another as living and significant views affecting our wish to see and understand what we see only as glimpses, but might see in its totality. Made as a video-short principally through a succession of quick sequences, "Glimpses" shows the maintenance of mystery between two "masked" people in a world where the curtains remain closed.

In Fellini's film Amarcord, an ocean liner emerges from the night and the mists of the water, appears like a mysterious monster, passes like a dream. This video takes up the idea of ​​an unreal "passage" and plays the effect of spectacular surprise that it reveals.

A pivotal work for video art of the 1980s. Fragments of time during a journey where the changing landscapes become full players in a story shown in shadowy backplay, which relates the imagined encounter of two passengers.

A fictional video excursion: on a beautiful summer day, peaceable tourists take the Montenvers cog railway right up to the Mer de glace. Full of humour and affection, it pays homage to the films of Jacques Tati.

Hanoi 2003. A woman does her hair at night. A train passes between the houses. A crowd rushes by jostling, working. A forgotten child waits.

No synopsis available yet.

Music by Bernard Premegiani.

Legendary characters in medieval and oriental costumes meet near a well. A slow ritual punctuated by races that the shot transforms and expands through slow motion. Choreographic tale by Ma Danse Rituel Théâtre, based on the show Le Puits de l'épervier by Hideyuki Yano. Legendary characters in medieval and oriental costumes meet near a well. Slow ritual punctuated by races that the shot transforms and expands through slow motion.

A film by Robert Cahen

A film by Robert Cahen

The union of the Indestructible Objet (1923-1959) by Man Ray and L'Infiltration homogenee for grand piano by Joseph Beuys (1966). Here the intersection of two temporalities is at stake: one punctuated by the pulsations of the metronome, the other marked by the continuous silence of Beuys’ piano.