Patrice Kirchhofer

Continuation of the essay on the cinema of Louis Skorecki through the relations of some young cinephiles.

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.

Film by Patrice Kirchhofer.

Story of a squatter family told by a rat.

SENSITOMETRIE V, the first film that I saw by K., bored me to death… A black screen, a few rare profiles of a window… I couldn’t take any more, so I left the theater, unable to wait until the twenty-minute “duration” of the film had elapsed… Bernard WEIDMANN - RHIZOME HERETIQUE - March 3rd, 1980.

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I saw people flee in fright before the force of Chromaticité I, during which I remained fastened to my seat, in the clutches of fear. The last image, the screen turns white: I glance at my neighbour, immobilised just as myself. (Bernard Weidmann, Rhizome Hérétique, 1980)

This film is an audio interview of Louis Skorecki, filmmaker and film critic for Cahiers du cinéma, by Patrice Kirchhofer and Gérard Courant. This interview, later put into images by Gérard Courant, is centred around the feature film Eugénie de Franval, based on Sade's novella, which Louis Skorecki shot in 1974 and which was awarded the prize of "la porte entrouverte" at the festival of young cinema in Toulon in 1975 by the jury composed of Marguerite Duras, Shuji Terayama and Dominique Noguez.

No description available.

Animated scouting whose primary goal is to reactivate the poetry of myths in urban areas.

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I had the sudden urge to run through the forest while watching ATARAXIE I. Upon returning home, I went straight to my dictionary to look up the meaning of the title: “Tranquility of the soul. For the Stoics, a state of mind that nothing can disrupt: the ideal of the sage.” (Bernard WEIDMANN - RHIZOME HERETIQUE - March 3rd, 1980.)

“Breaking in. Patrice Kirchhofer’s Anorexie 4 continues on the path of the narrated narrative (a short story by Chandler) and Décembre 79 on the path of photography. At the end of these two journeys, the film becomes the subject and the trace of the same act of breaking in. In Anorexie 4 the voice shapes the images (the play of chess and of light) and in Décembre 79, shot in the same abandoned mining region, the photos shape the film: chemical deposits, fossils instantaneously striped and imprinted by signs of life and haunted by their ghostly presence. A space of dreary grey, of desolation, which is in a never-ending process of dying because the place, even before being filmed, already went through a vampire-like depletion. In accepting the invitation of these tracking shots of abandoned factories, the spectator is summoned to riverbanks similar to those of Dreyer’s Vampyr and Murnau’s Nosferatu.” Charles TESSON. Festival de Digne. Cahiers du Cinéma n° 314 – Juillet–Août 1980.

Fotomatar is a french-spanish word more or less made up, which makes us think of a "phot-booth" (photomaton) and hesitate between "mater" ("mater" is a french slang word for "to look at") and matar (which means "to kill" in spanish). This film plays with narrativity. It's also a film about duration, about appearance of color (rather creepy), about suspense - a concerto for polaroïd triggers and horror scream. An experimental thriller.

Patrice Kirchhofer

A film driven by the musical universe of Patrice Kirchhofer.

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.

Radio interview with Nicolas Sarkozy.

First film made outside of pure animation, with all that it is possible to put and omit in a first film essay, which contains authoritatively - and without knowing it at the beginning - images made by others long before and not the least, with trifles that make a whole.

Densité Optique I (Optical Density I) mark a chromatic decomposition of the image. The choice to show a scrolling film movie as an extreme slow motion, frame by frame voluntarily directs the gaze on the work of the image. This aesthetic can remember those photographs retouched by painting. However, this type of image is obtained by a chemical decomposition of the film emulsion. Indeed, it is composed of three colored layers deposited on a transparent plastic substrate. Light passing through these layers is tinged with the colors and optical density, recreates the images and colors of the frames. Certain mixtures of chemistries acids attack these layers in the decolorizer, diluting in different aspects.