Martine Rousset

Reel 3 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series.

Sha-Dada is an "expanded" film on two screens which presents itself as a confrontation between two imperialisms.

A single-screen version of the Portraits / Mirrors multi-projection. Featuring portraits of: Aloual, Gaël Badaud, Raphaël Bassan, Yann Beauvais, Jean-Michel Bouhours, Gérard Courant, Berndt Deprez, Bertrand Gadenne, Mythia Kolésar, Christian Lebrat, Stéphane Marti, Pascal Martin, Michel Nedjar, Dominique Noguez, Vivian Ostrovsky, Bernard Roué, Martine Rousset, Alain Sayag, Unglee, and Catherine Zbinden.

Initial situation: models were invited to participate in their portrait by the contribution of personal objects and a great freedom of expression before the camera. This initial situation was conceived by Catherine Rebois. Graffon: I propose to film in a fragmented way these sessions of pose. Participants agree to be filmed at the same time they are photographed. Deliberately sharpened shift between an initial situation in its own duration and its filmic recording. The sequence of photographic shooting sessions is shattered.

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.

Free adaptation of Faulkner's novel aroused by the Patrick Henry and Ranucci cases.

Portrait of experimental filmmaker Martine Rousset.

No synopsis available yet.

The voices say a story. forget it. Of what time. And who speaks. Both of them. One or the other. later. Others may be. Of chance. Which would cross in this narrative. When. The times have intermingled. The winds meet. History. Pictures. The summer. Humble vacancy with furtive foliage. Fragile memory. Light is a trace of forgetfulness.

To examine the image of this face, this look, there are fragments of raw stories, mineral lights, snatches of an endless dream ... The insistence clashes, until abstraction , To the decomposed time, to its chaos with the gleams of stone. From that face coming back, nothing was said. The look can not be deciphered. The illusion, even to the darkness, remains mute. Signs of an absent song.

The first part of the Carolyn Carlson cycle. Between her and herself. Three images of the dance are repeated, come up against opacities that do not let themselves be crossed, are lost in transparencies from which there is no reflection. The sound describes their inevitable journey: this motionless movement.

This is what the city offers the passing foreigner: gold and night to the visitor who has barely arrived. Fragments, the stone found by the wayside, raw. We pick it up and keep it. Can we read into the gleaming lights passing by? What is written? Whole images, raw images, far from art and style.

Portrait. She dances in the center of her area. Obscure to the look. She abandons us to her limit. Turn. Count the chips. Conjugate. Turn on yourself, in a blind echo. Cross the already deserted space.

"Readings. A place. Purity of lines. Fine angles. Dominance of whites and blues. Fragility of tapered glasses." A visual evocation of the writing of Katherine Mansfield.

Night is falling the landscape is disappearing leave the world and its memory the night, rags in its wake last page.

An unknown writer written under the pseudonym of Laure at the beginning of the century. Readings. Geography. The places of a writing. The forces that create, traverse and lose it. The two image strips will be contiguous on the same screen. Their continuous and simultaneous operation. Two mirrors. The voices and their silences are reflected in it. Fade away.

Traces of stories. The images themselves. Tear off. Stain. To paint. Makes light out of them.

Originally a text in fragments, more or less biographical, of different characters. Crossed stories, mixed times, memories and inventions. Coming from the voices encountered. They look like text like sisters. They are the voices of memory, the shadows cast by the characters, the voices of girls, the voices of indecision and evocation. We begin with this work: to read, to record (in analog, it takes breath). Here comes a place, a place found: the foliage of a vine in the South, crossed by the wind Mistral: a landscape. Where are we? Where the boy dies, would we see what he sees? Where was the child playing in the neighborhood? At the heart of the narrative, at the heart of the written word? That would happen. Harvesting images, shifting gears, Multiplying the generations with the listening of the voices, even in memory sometimes.

The last part of the Carolyn Carlson cycle. Last look. Oversight. Irreversible erasure. The song is immersed. Blinded.

On the one hand: A frame - and then windows in the frame - Spiked - from one to the other - Images designated - fenced, inside / out. Every moment broken - repeated. Always past. One after the other. Cruelty of the open boundary itself - and immediately some untimely object comes up against it - clog the sight - obliterate the frame. On the other hand: The note pursues an eternal moment. It's his game, run the frame, draw the embrasure, and so on. (...) she passes. Immediately in it she plays with nothing. Immediately outside she finds.

Readings. Heinrich von Kleist / Robert Walser. Contiguous. They talk about imagination. Walser imagines Kleist, Kleist nobody, but Penthesilea. In the new desert islands that are the enclaves of flowers of the city. Roses of sidewalks. Wild spaces with anonymity, truncated and without paths, in the banal stones of any career, inscribe and break the voices of an abrupt literary, hermetic and arid fragments in the image of places, almost no of place. Images figures of writing. In the blind corner. Without access. Very few signs.

Filmmaker's visual diary during her visit to Samarcande.

No synopsis available yet.

"Yerevan, Armenia, in the illegible secret of the country, imprisoned in its shadows, in its nights of the underground, nights of the basements, trains for nowhere... ephemeral traveler, light sleeper..."

With Istanbul, Martine Rousset puts on the brakes to the world's movement through a cinema of deceleration. At the boundaries between image by image movement and optical fusion, the rhythm of the film gives way to a suspended or floating time. Is it not certain that the idea of duration is more able to render a perception of the city that rather burns for intense emotion. It seems as if the camera cultivates a dreamy half-sleep. To this soft throbbing, blends however, variation of exposure as well. Therefore, at certain times, seeing becomes fragile and dangerous.

Wandering through Central Asia, the Caucasus, Kurdistan… to Istanbul. Cities and trains, steppes and snow, down there where the pulse of time evaporates; a very simple film, a navigation, attention letting yourself be taken to the threshold of time going, by hazardous paths... and very slow skies, up to the black sea, where Istanbul is absent, hides under the steps, leaves the place empty, abandons in its wake times undecided.

in the meantime , lighthouse , old lighthouse , far away , beyond the ponds , coolpix , little coolpix , long before the perfect clone .

Winter, fog, outside. The outline of eyes, sometimes we could ride those trails.

The city is leaving, slowly casting off, on the edge of time... It is leaving lightly... Not so far away, elsewhere, where time passes, has passed, will pass, on the horizon of time... The image glides on its path, a paper cargo ship, daughter of oblivion, free of history. It passes like a cloud, a dead leaf... A few stones remain, marked by vague eternity. A voice passes, from time to time, from distant memory... An ancient traveller? A distracted vagabond? It stands far away, in the rolling of time, silent.

Landscapes. A utilitarian nature. Contemporary. Cruel images. Changing. Seasons. The watch could be eternal. Each image transparent and non-avenue. Only the sound volumes will unfold an obscure duration.

Rousset photographs a train station in the evening, then boards a late-night train bound for mountainous Anatolia.

The unfinished Julien Gracq text, the road 1970, a forest near the sea, the enigma of a trajectory, by this text in this lanscape and this landscape in this text, it's diging, since a double echo to a same root, deep, invisible, an absolute presence, a stones fire, then, text and landscape are foliage of the same language.