Jérôme Cognet

The SS Champollion, liner of the Maritime Messengers Company and assigned to the Egypt-Syria express line (Alexandria, Port Said, Beirut), had to transport emigrants to Palestine and Port Said. On December 22, 1952, following a confusion between the Beirut airport lighthouse and the one at the Al Manara port, the crew carried out an operation that rushed the ship onto the breakers 600 meters from the shore. Due to a storm, the lifeboats close to the tragedy were unable to respond, leaving the passengers trapped in the wreckage. At the end, it was thanks to three Lebanese brothers named Baltagi, who succeeded in docking the ship, that a large number of passengers were saved.

CIEL DÉGAGÉ 3/10ÈME is a found-footage film based on the idea of blinding in the moving image. This film is composed of photographic flashes from filmic works and refers to the idea of projection, both in the cinematographic sense as well as in its most devastating form: the nuclear bomb.

Inspired by Isaac Asimov's short story "Nightfall", this film portrays the anxiety and hysteria of a civilization that has never known night, in the face of the impending death of the suns that compose its solar system. The images of LE SOLEIL TOUT ENTIER NE SE TROUVE NULLE PART are taken from scenes of existing narrative films where the sun is predominant, and from which all human forms have been erased in post-production. This film is organized around colorimetric variations and a decreasing luminosity, as in Asimov's story. The soundtrack comes from sound recordings of the energy produced by solar winds captured by NASA's Parker Probe.

Fragments of vinyl records, microgrooves, cinematographic wefts which, through editing and sampling, tend to reject any storytelling, to become exclusively language of avoidance and reappropriation.

By gathering all of its manifestations, it’s as if this film gives us permission to say to the American flag: "We know your forms and incarnations. We know what you are capable of being. The list of your meanings is complete. You will likely not become anything else in the future. From now on, you belong to the past, and we will look at you as such." A mythology behind us, despite today’s carnivalesque efforts to revive it. – Ivan Trabuc

Images without worlds, without edges. Floating landscapes, absorbed stares. We perceive the rustle of optical sounds: a white noise that blurs the other sounds. The spectator, numb, falls into an elsewhere at the gates of sleep.

The SS Champollion, liner of the Maritime Messengers Company and assigned to the Egypt-Syria express line (Alexandria, Port Said, Beirut), had to transport emigrants to Palestine and Port Said. On December 22, 1952, following a confusion between the Beirut airport lighthouse and the one at the Al Manara port, the crew carried out an operation that rushed the ship onto the breakers 600 meters from the shore. Due to a storm, the lifeboats close to the tragedy were unable to respond, leaving the passengers trapped in the wreckage. At the end, it was thanks to three Lebanese brothers named Baltagi, who succeeded in docking the ship, that a large number of passengers were saved.

CIEL DÉGAGÉ 3/10ÈME is a found-footage film based on the idea of blinding in the moving image. This film is composed of photographic flashes from filmic works and refers to the idea of projection, both in the cinematographic sense as well as in its most devastating form: the nuclear bomb.

Inspired by Isaac Asimov's short story "Nightfall", this film portrays the anxiety and hysteria of a civilization that has never known night, in the face of the impending death of the suns that compose its solar system. The images of LE SOLEIL TOUT ENTIER NE SE TROUVE NULLE PART are taken from scenes of existing narrative films where the sun is predominant, and from which all human forms have been erased in post-production. This film is organized around colorimetric variations and a decreasing luminosity, as in Asimov's story. The soundtrack comes from sound recordings of the energy produced by solar winds captured by NASA's Parker Probe.

Fragments of vinyl records, microgrooves, cinematographic wefts which, through editing and sampling, tend to reject any storytelling, to become exclusively language of avoidance and reappropriation.

By gathering all of its manifestations, it’s as if this film gives us permission to say to the American flag: "We know your forms and incarnations. We know what you are capable of being. The list of your meanings is complete. You will likely not become anything else in the future. From now on, you belong to the past, and we will look at you as such." A mythology behind us, despite today’s carnivalesque efforts to revive it. – Ivan Trabuc

Images without worlds, without edges. Floating landscapes, absorbed stares. We perceive the rustle of optical sounds: a white noise that blurs the other sounds. The spectator, numb, falls into an elsewhere at the gates of sleep.

F.L.I.R. deals mainly with military imagery captured by AC-130s, BlackHawks and war drones during ordered missions on Syrian, Afghan and Iraqi territory. The sound material comes from the sensations and feelings of the soldiers responsible for carrying out these objectives. In this project, the aim is to poetically destroy this military aesthetic in such a way as to paradoxically place the viewer in a combat space so that he can feel its sensory depths.

The images of GUERILLA-HUBBLE come essentially from scientific imagery captured by the Hubble telescope (galaxies, nebulae, black holes). The sound refers to the roar of social unrest (riots, demonstrations, guerrillas). The aim of this project is to combine the vibrations and trajectories of the universe with those related to social upheavals in a kind of « chaosmos ». It is perhaps in this « internal identity of the world and chaos », in James Joyce's words, that all the resonances and arrangements of stars and men reveal their common determinations, whether they are driven by objective or subjective forces.

On January 4, 1903, thousands of spectators gathered at Luna Park on Coney Island to attend the death by electrocution of the elephant named Topsy. This event was filmed using the Universal Projecting Kinescope, capable of recording 12 images on 35mm film, invented by Thomas Alva Edison a few years earlier.