Michèle Bokanowski

Reworked and colored images of people playing at the seashore.

Walking towards the fire. In a ceaseless stream of light, people, landscapes and objects lead us to mysterious regions. French filmmaker Patrick Bokanowski’s work is hard to classify - and all the richer for it. Together with his wife Michèle, whose musique concrète compositions form the basis of the sound design, Bokanowski offers a prolonged, dense and visually visceral experience of the kind that is rare in cinema today. Difficult to define and locate, its strangeness is quite unique.

The climbing of an immense staircase made up of the most varied stairs. Symbolic scenes occur on different levels where characters seem to be prisoners of their deeds and of their own folly. The steep staircase leads little by little towards the zones of great light where human beings and nonhuman beings meet.

Choreography of an imaginary journey.

Experimental film by Patrick Bokanowski.

A contemporary dance video and a tribute to Patrick Bokanowski. The choreography of Bernardo Montet, conceived and created to be filmed by Robert Cahen, is based on the music of Michèle Bokanowski. It speaks of the loneliness of the dancer in the centre of the stage.

A housewife is preparing a duck à l'orange in her kitchen. But the reluctant bird tries to escape from her but the woman manages to recaptures it and plucks it savagely. Once the duck is put in the oven, an alligator unexpectedly appears in the kitchen, threatening the cook.

Relentlessly reworking ‘real’ images, using techniques borrowed from painting and animated film, Patrick Bokanowski is an author of stature, capable of creating an insane and cataclysmic universe of unquestionable beauty.

WINDOWS : Intermediate states.

In this documentary, under the gaze of Pip Chodorov, Patrick Bokanowski evokes the genesis of his films and shows, by explaining them, a certain number of his inspirations (his meeting with the painter Henri Dimier , his first photographic tests...), his tools (lenses, title bench, masks, costumes...), his attempts, such as this idea of ​​filming the moving reflection of a mercury surface.

Memories split in the space.

A Creator of the Imaginary: Patrick Bokanowski

A work of visual art that borrows from music the principles of the fugue, with the sudden flight of a man to his hotel room as its main theme. Where he dreams.

Bokanowski returns to the complex - and mind-bending - optical array of pinholes, mirrors, prisms, and refractive substrates of his earlier film, La Plage to create the whimsical and playful Au bord du lac. The film is composed of mundane, everyday scenes of recreation and leisure on an idyllic, sunny day at a park that overlooks a lake - rowing a boat, playing a game of volleyball, rollerskating, bicycling, reading a newspaper, sunbathing, riding on horseback, or strolling on the promenade - shot through optical distortions to create fractured and knotted images that resemble embellished, gothic fairytale illustrations or appear to resolve into morphing, geometric patterns of fluid motion. Evoking the vibrant colors and sun-soaked palette of an invigorated Vincent van Gogh in Arles, Bokanowski transforms the quotidian into an infinitely mesmerizing dynamic kaleidoscope of shape-shifting textures and self-reconstituting objects of organic, abstract art.

2018 short film by Patrick Bokanowski

A painter in his studio: his pencils, brushes, tubes, table, easel and drawings set themselves in motion in an explosion of colors and flashes of light.

Behold the struggle between light and dark, the two principles that are at the very heart of the cinematic deed. A Solar Dream takes the seventh art’s ability to generate imaginary and phantasmagorical worlds to the limit, multiplied here by Michèle Bokanowski’s enveloping music. A precious plastic and sonic gem.

Afraid of losing his wife, Horatio creates a replica he calls Hortensia. But things don't go as planned... Shot on 35mm and propelled by an impressive score by Michèle Bokanowski, the Quay Brothers evoke an intense drama of jealousy, betrayal and murder, revolving around a window dresser's obsession for a life-sized doll.

A study of human anxieties about beauty, youth and objectification.