Stéphane Marti

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.

Michel Journiac's actions (1935-1995) are unique works and have never been repeated (except for the first, Mass for a body, 1969). Only photographs, films or videos testify to their existence.

The film appears like a ritual with splendids and crypteds psalms. The Great Master of Order (Marcel Mazé, new fetish actor after Aloual) seduces the young male prey with a running cinema projector which carves Murnau's Nosferatu extracts on their bodies. Metamorphosis, rituals passages, Eros and Thanotos, illusion and reality, film into the film are the themes and images in perpetual osmosis in this Stéphane Marti's opus.

Halleluia : one of the most beautiful prayers in the world, a magnificent and distributing piece from Leonard Cohen, wavering between the sacred and the profane, suggesting pain, pleasure, lust, and lost physical love ; a mournful eroticism chanted with sensuality and formidable grace by Jeff Buckley, an inspired performer/angel. Hence my deep desire to project my own ritual of images on its spellbinding lyrics. S.M

A seraphic creature named Vyva - both Queen of Sheba, Moon Pythia, Spider-Woman and Mary Magdalene - offers kisses, caresses and jewelry to a man coming out of her dream box ... and who could be Jesus. Bewitching and sacred electroacoustic music, incantatory gestures, murmured texts, deliciously supersaturated decor of precious objects. Everything clicks, in visual and sound volutes, for an invitation to the Purple dream.

The paths of eight characters brush against one another, collide, avoid one another, attract one another or clash in the texture of a Super 8 ballet film. Climax attemps to transalte the sensation of a nightmare which, by nature evades reality, fiction and even memory to engrave syncopated, brief, distorded, repetitive and obsessive pictures in our brains. These pictures are those of a murder fantasy.

It is a fragmented portrait where Marcel embodies different characters, a mischievous dandy immersed in a profusion of shimmers and erotic pictures, a bewitching photographer featuring nonchalant beauties like Sicilian shepherds or a black angel, romantic walker Nosferant performing cyclical rituals that celebrate Eros and Thanatos. Dark or bright masks of his desires echoing. Lyrical images, film editions as secular and sacred celebrations where, in the often frenzied allegories which unveil a bewitching Marcel, entangled beautiful and young shooting stars such as Sarah, Orlan, Baptiste, Patrice, Samuel, Roman, Thomas, Anders, Alex, Christian, Yohan or Elie.

The episode of Gérard Courant's Carnets filmés, Crime contre le cinéma (December 25, 2006 to December 2, 2006) is divided into four parts: Colas Ricard at Centre Pompidou, Joseph Morder at La Rochelle, the Filmer à tout prix Festival in Brussels, and Michel Nedjar and Jakobois at Centre Pompidou.

Two merry partners, fleshy roses and an improvised dance celebrate this glamrock jewel that glorifies the ambiguity of desire.

Metamorphoses, rites of passage, Eros and Thanatos, illusion and reality, and film within a film are the key themes and images in perpetual osmosis within this film.

Long slides of images and sounds reveal the subtle mysteries of a forgotten Eros embodied by Aloual, the fetish actor. A captivating profane ceremony where drawings, photos, objects, assemblages, paintings and fragments of films interpenetrate in strange hybridizations. Slides between digital and film that also cross the territories of Thanatos to resurface in the energy of a wild and joyful dance.

With an editing engraved as a jewel, this movie is a real neo-baroque manifest. On the one hand, the Seine's sparkling, the Alexandre III bridge's sculptures and the majestic stairs descents of a mysterious personage ; on the other hand, the brilliance of a mirror reveals a lascivious inner space, invaded by art works, strange objects, tropical plants, heavy clothes, in the middle of which sit enthroned the Aesthete contemplating male nudes photos. The crystalline voice of a counter-tenor celebrating Bach perfects the voluptuous feeling emerging from this movie.

Filmmaker and teacher, Stéphane Marti has been researching experimental cinema as an art form liberated of aesthetic codes and the economics of big budget cinema. His work is primarily focused on the themes of the sacred and the human body. An avid supporter of the Super-8 format, he has been fighting for its merits as a tool. He has used this format film after film and has been sharing his experiences with new filmmakers during his workshops at the Sorbonne’s College of the Arts (Paris I).

Through the lyricism and the baroque energy of the famous Christmas oratorio, super-8 pictures with a prevailing black colour catch in a jerky way an elfic trio of merry male accompplices wandering through the Père Lachaise cemetery. Some sentences taken from ‘Le Dictionnaire de l’Amour’ by Dominique Noguez make their complicity clear and are used as a counterpoint to the ballet of their loitering.

Ritual of seduction led by Aloual, principal actant of the filmmaker's first films. This ritual, carried by the rock energy of the divine Lou Reed, accelerates in a frenzied gesture that develops the erotic imagination... Ambiguity of the male nature... gender trouble... This ritual of seduction open to erotics dreams...

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.

Stéphane Marti is a teacher and film-maker who, since 1976, has been expounding the plasticity of experimental cinema, freeing it from the dominant codes of narrative cinema. An avid defender of Super-8mm film (which he has been using for 30 years), he has fought for the acknowledgement of its excellence as a film-making tool. His work, which screens in festivals and at international events, has been the subject of numerous interviews and articles. Flamboyant, baroque and sensual, his work revolves primarily around the question of the body and the sacred.

Carried by chamanics and cosmics vibrations music, this movie present us Aloual, the fetish actor, in a kind of naked and listless semi-captivity. Sustained by bandages, half floating in the airs, arrowed by glances, this St-Sebastian is the heart of a ritual who combine plastic beauty, Chrisitc's dolor and pagan's voluptuous pleasures.

This film is built as a funeral ceremony ; it conveys an investigation on the underworld. In an environment of devastated telluric forces (one-hundred-year-old trees from the Fontainebleau forest were uprooted by the storm of 1999 winter). There is a superb officiating priest in a black tuxedo. The film refers to the everlasting cycle of death, the extraction of a corpse by a young nymph remind’s us of Caravaggio’s paintings, this ceremony is full of ablutions and jewellery; a flowy, golden path to a wonderful mirror through which the miracle of resurrection takes place.

Extracts of Le Chant d'Amour (1950) by Jean Genet, absolute fetish movie-poem, are screened as moving tattoos on a lying body who surrenders to bites of sensuousness.