Vivian Ostrovsky

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.

"Going through my mini DVs shot over the past decade, I rediscovered a forgotten night sequence of Chantal Akerman and Sonia Wieder-Atherton leaving a brasserie where we had dined together in Montparnasse. The excerpt stayed with me for a while. This prompted me to focus on Chantal’s sound work in her films and her very close collaboration with cellist, Sonia Wieder-Atherton with whom she made more than 20 films. And, since New York, Paris and Moscow were places the three of us had in common, I intertwined some of my images with hers."

Funny collage of sea, sun and ice. A show from the beach with skiers, tigers, mermaids and much more.

"The film is a travelogue of sorts. In 1960 my family lived in Brazil when my father discovered his sister and brother in Moscow, who he hadn't seen for 40 years, were still alive. Since they couldn't leave the USSR we went to visit them regularly for about 15 years. At the time I had my 8mm then a super 8 camera with which I filmed the family, our outings, picnics, markets and their homes… I decided to use this material, which was not very interesting per se, by mixing it with Soviet found-footage of the same period (1960's, 1970's, 1980's). I used feature films, propaganda footage, newsreels, etc. The result is a kind of Khruschev-era mix with a collage of Soviet music and a voice-over of my memories of the Cold War period."

This video was made for an exhibition in Rio on Paulo Werneck, one of Oscar Niemeyer's collaborators. Werneck was the first to introduce mosaics in Brazilian Modernist architecture. P.W. shows the context of the artist's work in Rio and Belo Horizonte in the 50s and 60s as well as Brasilia at the time of its construction in 1960. It's an inventive collage of archival footage, music and Werneck's modernist mosaics.

A delightful update of Jacques Tati’s classic Les Vacances de M. Hulot (Mr. Hulot’s Holidays). Seagulls squawk, waves crash and swimmers cavort in endless summer days spent on the beach. TATITUDE suggests that sand, water and sun are the basic elements in a happy, carefree life, and maybe even the secret to eternal youth.

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.

A Russian can say, “I hear the smell…” A maestro has a vision of what a symphony should sound like. In a silent film how can one make the spectator see the sound? A vivid and noisy assemblage of archival and contemporary imagery meditating on the past and presence of film audio.

A humorous glimpse of what happens every morning on the wavy sidewalks of Copacabana Beach. Physical fitness, Brazilian style, with a dash of soccer and hints of Carmen Miranda.

Brooklyn boxers and boucing balls.Catalan dancers and Provençals dogs. The Douro, the Danube, Biarritz, Brazil. In super 8 colours and black and white sounds.

An observation of humans' and animals' table manners as they gulp down breakfasts, lunches, cocktails and dinners in a variety of situations.

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.

No description available.

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.

A fragmented tribute to Ukranian-Brazilian novelist and fashion journalist Clarice Lispector that interrogates the idea of "in-betweenness," the intermission, a hiatus.

A felinosophy of life.

With a super 8 camera from Paris to Berlin, from Amsterdam to Rio, from Jerusalem to New York shooting only at night. Hungarian crooners, Indian tribal chants, opera arias, and an occasional samba make up the sound track of this “hand-held” diary.

No description available.

In this narrative, scenes from film classics by Antonioni, Truffaut and others have a common theme of phone calls, yet the telephone assumes another role, that of an intimate camera that records scenes from the present, communicating with the images from the history of cinematography, calling them by phone.