Yann Beauvais

"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."

"It is above all a portrait of Miles McKane. Making a portrait, shooting a portrait are all modes of perpetuating/appropriating a person's image. Could a cinematographic portrait escape this rule?" -YB

No description available.

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.

Experimental short film

DERRUBADA NÃO! is a film essay deploying a reflection via an experiment whose objective is to measure the impact of an artistic gesture that crystallizes a set of questions relating to what can be defined as belonging: an ethnic group, a history, a language, a culture..

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.

Reel 33 of Gérard Courant’s on-going Cinematon series.

VO/ID juxtaposes two separate texts, one in French and the other in English. The texts question art and experimental cinema, the role of the market in shaping aesthetic criteria, and current politics... In each of the texts, words common to the other language appear, creating an indeterminacy of the word to this or that speech. This indeterminacy is increased by the many word games created between the two languages. This results in a double reading: vertical and horizontal, favoured by the word for word. The exposure time of each word depends on the rhythmic of each language, but their appearance in white or black is not subject to it. Faced with these texts, two sounds intervene and otherwise disturb the concentration required by the projected texts. The horizontal reading of both speeches is often in clear contradiction with their meaning. This third visual discourse is playful, brittle, mocking the seriousness of the discourse(s).

Initial situation: models were invited to participate in their portrait by the contribution of personal objects and a great freedom of expression before the camera. This initial situation was conceived by Catherine Rebois. Graffon: I propose to film in a fragmented way these sessions of pose. Participants agree to be filmed at the same time they are photographed. Deliberately sharpened shift between an initial situation in its own duration and its filmic recording. The sequence of photographic shooting sessions is shattered.

RR uses musical models as a paradigm. The central part of each section of the film is based on a transcription of a Bach composition for two voices. The two screens underscore this paradigm insofar as one is always the simultaneous reflection of the visual development of the other, regardless of the position of the reels (left or right): a visual representation of the inversion technique of a theme that is often used in music. The use of mirroring deliberately side-steps the question of the reality of representation. It no longer has any importance, now that we’re in the domain of the reflected image, of imitation. The two images reflect one another in a constant back and forth, mimicking to a certain extent the development of the (fake) pans that comprise the film. The pans metaphorically evoke, if only superficially, the keyboard.

Study of the Mont Sainte Victoire.

“Reading Rimbaud today means to relate his experiences, his desires, to ours – it means that we see a strong connection between his quest and what is today at stake in gay issues. Selecting pieces of poems and letters I have tried to give back a kind of emergency that I sense within his poetry.” –Yann Beauvais

No description available.

This film considers the subject of HIV and AIDS from a variety of different viewpoints. On the one hand using textual material in both English and French which appears on screen at different speeds and rhythms, and on the other, articulated by the appearance of human voice on the sound track. It is a story of a person confronted with a civilization which promotes death as a way of life.

Filmed in August 1997, in the New South Wales, then left to decay for several years in other tropical climates, before being scanned and finally edited in Recife in 2023. A fog partially covering a tropical forest. When I seized these elements twenty years later, the question of the existence of this same forest arises.

Remarks on the recent war in Lebanon.

No description available.

Result of a slow decomposition of 16mm prints of QUATR'UN in Recife. One set was scanned frame by frame and cropped to include the perforations. Dissolution of the frame and mimetic representation in time.

No description available.