Philippe Cote

Founded in the second half of the 1990s, the experimental film association L'Etna witnessed the transition from film to digital cinema. Its premises, located in the heart of Paris, were unable to withstand gentrification.

Intimate and tactile capture of the outside world through its original material (water, earth, sky, light) in the time of a look, a presence.

The tale of an encounter...

Lanzarote, a volcanic island of the Canary Islands was shaped in the eighteenth century by a series of eruptions. It preserves its memory through semi-desert mineral landscapes. In 2015, I traveled this territory in search of the cataclysm. In this devastated landscape, traces of a return to life were emerging.

Ghosts of matter, luminous traces, original worlds, made of internal sedimentations, surface, merge, vanish.

Liquefied pictures morph into substances of airborne [volatile] lights. The eye does not have hold anymore on forms with a now unsteady outline. By successive births, these throw themselves little by little in different conditions of color until they are embodied in the completion of a picture.

Resulting from performance projections of films painted directly on film. The film literally confronts pure abstraction and the unrolling of the film loaded with materials.

'The angle of the world allows us to see the real as an outer and inner presence at the same time, an opaque otherness, yet capable of becoming an intimate space. These incommensurable lengths and distances of an interior that opens up: The mysterious movement of the clouds, the cadence of the waves against the light, or the silent slippage of a barely identifiable human silhouette, everything seems transfigured, derealized and reinvented by light in a poetic world that evokes the paintings of Turner or Friedrich, the writings of Poe or Baudelaire.’ — Violeta Salvatierra

"This is a rarely seen cameraless film, made using the pinhole technique by applying light directly on the unexposed emulsion. Cote explores celluloid with color filters and different intensities of light as if expressing his most intimate and vital self. The flashes of luminosity seem to be signals of connection, maybe hope, inside one’s inner darkness." - Mónica Savirón, Museum of the Moving Image

"At the beginning, they were those words that you wrote to me in order to generate images. I would make them from far away, alone in Seville in Andalousia. Then, after a first silent version, first editing...The film would encounter its final from as an intimate essay split between your voice and poems that you read and my images." - Philippe Cote

Each year, the Tamil community from South India and Sri Lanka met to celebrate the God Ganesh. The film is a description of gestures, dancing bodies, attendance recorded during this festival, crossing reminiscences of my stays in India.

In this film, shots from two voyages unfold in parallel. First, 8mm images made at the beginning of the seventies by an unknown traveler: this 20-minute film was found at a flea market. A handwritten text described an itinerary, while the boxes indicated the years 1973 and 1975. These shots, left as they are, punctuate super8 images filmed by me during two recent trips, in 2008 and 2010, organized in the sequence with respect to the itinerary that I had followed. The soundtrack for my images comes from the ambient sounds recorded on location as well as from online sharing sites, while the older images have been left silent. It is a film of snapshots revealed and developed by a gaze, taken in a geography dreamed up by the author: not a travel journal but a travel film: a voyage to the interior of a signifier, a desire of a poetics of image and sound.

Short film by Philippe Cote.

Short film by Philippe Cote.

... I head to Thailand and then to northern Lao (Luang Prabang then hopefully further north), then certainly to Cambodia. At the source of this journey, there is a longing for a renewal of my cinema, for the search of new lights, of new areas, of new relations...

A moment spent in a garden. Bursts of light, flowers trembling, life flies by.

Nocturnal dreamlike wandering, filmed in several cities of Southern Europe: Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece. Starting from a visual motif, the film gradually develops a more metaphorical tone. The title is a tribute to the film by Clemens Klopfenstein.

At the origin of these departures, is the research of lights, spaces, instants to renew my cinema, to be closer to the poetic documentary: being there and watching, recording length, not trying to force things to come...

Ordinary scenes: a market in South Laos ... Agencements of raw snapshots

Between shadow and light / Fairytale around the abysses and its people / Back to the cinema.

The human face, from original black to full light. Haptic cinema, the camera prolongs the body looking for these moments of confusion where other opportunities emerge. Shot in Super 8, the film has been upgraded in a self made fashion by re-filming inside a projector.

This film describes different forms and manifestations of water. The experience of the filmmaker's body immersed in water, sunken into the liquid element, represents the main theme of this poetic essay on the imagination of this element.