Véréna Paravel
Directing
Biography
Véréna Paravel (born 21 April 1971; Neuchâtel) is a French anthropologist and artist who works in film, video, and photography. Paravel was born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, to French parents, and grew up in Algeria, Portugal, Togo, Côte d'Ivoire, the Soviet Union, and France. She taught at the Université de Toulouse, and received her PhD in Anthropology and Communication Sciences from the Université de Toulouse II. She later worked with Bruno Latour at the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris. In 2004, she moved to the United States, where she had a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University. Since 2006, Verena Paravel has worked with Lucien Castaing-Taylor at the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University. She has been a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, and in 2012-13 she was the Frieda L. Miller Fellow in Film, Video, Sound, and New Media at the Film Study Center and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She is also on the master class faculty at the Ecole des Arts Politiques at Sciences Po in Paris. In 2013, she and Castaing-Taylor jointly received the True Vision Award from the True/False Film Festival. Her works in film and video have screened at Berlin, Locarno, New York, Toronto, and other film festivals. They include 7 Queens (2008), Interface Series (2008-10), Foreign Parts (2010), and Leviathan (with Castaing-Taylor, 2012).
Known For
Rachel loves her life, her students, her friends, her ex, her guitar lessons. When she falls in love with Ali, she grows close to his 4-year-old daughter, Leila. She tucks her in, looks after her, and loves her like a mother... which she isn’t. Not yet. Rachel is 40. The desire for a family of her own is growing stronger, and the clock is ticking. Is it too late?
Other People's Children
Maya is a photographer. She takes photos related to the eyeball. Kunio is a neurosurgeon and an independent documentary film director. He is interested on making a documentary about Maya. A mysterious eyeball collector watches for Maya's own eyeballs.
The Eye's Dream
Caniba is a fresco about flesh and desire. It reflects on the discomfiting significance of cannibalism in human existence through the prism of one Japanese man, Issei Sagawa, and his mysterious relationship with his brother, Jun Sagawa.
Caniba
An extraordinary adventure through the interior of the human body; or the discovery of an alien landscape of unprecedented beauty.
De Humani Corporis Fabrica
A documentary about a group of pilgrims who travel to Nepal to worship at the legendary Manakamana temple.
Manakamana
An experimental portrait of the North American commercial fishing industry through the lens of GoPro cameras placed on a fishing vessel off the coast of New England.
Leviathan
An unsentimental elegy to the American West, Sweetgrass follows the last modern-day cowboys to lead their flocks of sheep up into Montana's breathtaking and often dangerous Absaroka-Beartooth mountains for summer pasture, revealing a world in which nature and culture, animals and humans, vulnerability and violence are all intimately meshed.
Sweetgrass
A famous American filmmaker travels to the Yucatán to scout locations for his last movie. The Mayan Apocalypse intercedes.
The Last Film
Works with sound recordings of Dion McGregor, who became famous for talking in his sleep.
Somniloquies
A portrayal of a hidden enclave of auto shops and junkyards fated for demolition in the shadow of a new baseball stadium in Queens. The film observes this vibrant community of immigrants – where wrecks, refuse, and recycling form a thriving commerce – as it struggles for daily survival and contests New York City's development scheme.
Foreign Parts
An archaeology of both the ocean and the image, this piece reworks the sequences of Leviathan that were shot in and from the sea. Projected at 1/50 of the speed at which they were recorded, it simultaneously slows movement and animates the still, revealing a liminal universe at the threshold of human vision. In this flux, one beholds a netherworld of aqueous forms that appear in one frame and disappear or transmogrify into something else in the next.
He Maketh a Path to Shine After Him; One Would Think the Deep to Be Hoary
No description available.
8mm, archives des Sagawa, montées
“Ah humanity! reflects on the fragility and folly of humanity in the age of the Anthropocene. Taking the 3/11/11 disaster of Fukushima as its point of departure, it evokes an apocalyptic vision of modernity, and our predilection for historical amnesia and futuristic flights of fancy. Shot on a telephone through a handheld telescope, at once close to and far from its subject, the audio composition combines excerpts from Japanese genbaku film soundtracks, audio recordings from scientific seismic laboratories, and location sound.”—Ernst Karel, Verena Paravel & Lucien Castaing-Taylor
Ah Humanity!
A two-channel installation utilizing both digital video and 16mm film, Commensal focuses on the controversial figure of Issei Sagawa, who gained notoriety in 1981 when, as a graduate student in Paris, he murdered a fellow student and engaged in acts of cannibalism. After his release from a mental institution, Sagawa returned to Japan, and later appeared in innumerable documentaries and sexploitation films. In contrast to earlier journalistic documentaries on Sagawa, the film suspends moral judgment and explores a realm that eludes classification as either “documentary” or “pure fiction,” to instead chart the ambiguous territory between crime, fantasy, and social realities, between an individual and the economy of his public persona.
Commensal
Submarine spirits of monsters and demons, soldiers and sailors, pirates andwarriors, slaves and serpents, skulls and skeletons.
Spirit Stills
A short companion to Leviathan, set inside the fishing vessel.
Still Life
Ephemeral encounters recorded during a walk beneath the elevated tracks of the No. 7 subway line in New York City.
7 Queens
An apocalyptic vision of the vertiginous intermingling of the sea and the sky.