Jean-Michel Bouhours

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.

According to Hesiod, autumn begins when the Pleiades, the daughters of Atlas, rise. It is generally said that autumn is the most beautiful of the seasons, for the spectacle that nature offers but also because it is the time of the harvest and the grape harvest: "the march of Bacchus and his procession" wrote Lucretius.

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.

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Reel 15 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series.

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Covers the making of the multicolored magazine for technological arts, Melba, edited by Claudine Eizykman and in which Guy Fihman, Dominique Willoughby, among others, were active participants, with 5 issues published between 1976 and 1979.

Autonomous part of the film UNDER THE SIGN OF THE LION, corresponding to the letter L. Camera obscura experience. Capture the light ray, place it in a frame, which itself has a second internal frame. Visual effects of flickers and "counterflickers," as in music we speak of on- and off-beats.

Found footage film, on the theme of the Spanish Civil War and the popular song "Ay, Carmela !" (or "El Paso del Ebro"), a song composed in 1808 during the liberation war against the Napoleonic invader and which was taken up by the Republican Army and the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War.

The psychomotor development of a young child followed between the ages of 8 and 18 months serves as a reminder of how this extraordinary potential for human development will very quickly be undermined by the capture of the child's attention via screens, with the aim of making him or her as good a part of consumerist society as possible as quickly as possible. The film is based on a discrepancy between this global phenomenon of child sacrifice, with its devastating effects, which is the work of the mass media, and an 'experimental' cinematographic language that cannot be retrieved by what is known as the 'attention economy'.

NOCES DE SANG is a tribute to Spanish culture, to the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca and to the cinema of Carlos Saura. New experiments were tried in this film: the palimpsest with series of drawings made on old books, but also the transparency of silk paper or tracing paper on which I also drew and refilmed images through. – J.-M.B.

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Chantilly Revisited combines the slow-motion images of the film Chantilly (1976) and the original painted elements. It is a work of deconstruction of the grid of the original film which confronts the cinematographic framework as a unit with multiple subdivisions. Does the image framework remain an unsurpassable convention, inherent in the very principle of the traditional image? A reflection on abstraction in cinema.

The Jaleo is a summer festival on the island of Menorca (Spain) based on a parade of horses native to the island and exemplary docility, ridden by funny riders, dressed as clergymen or academicians wearing bicorns. The party lasts 24 hours without interruption. The most reckless among the public, often under the influence of alcohol, must raise the animal and move it forward on its two hind legs as long as possible. The musical motif is constantly repeated and becomes a haunting, obsessive tune. The images were captured with what I had on hand: a mobile phone that forced me to record very short sequences. The montage highlights the power of enchantment by repeating situations, gestures and musical motifs. JMB

It was while proceeding with the digital restoration of the film CHANTILLY produced in 1976 that the idea for this project came about. Originally the idea was to do a follow-up to the original film, a sort of unrolling of all the graphic elements of the "multi-screen" grid; but very quickly, another film came to the fore. The superimposition of 80 painted transparent celluloid gels and monochromes used for the backgrounds called for new elements to come from a different personal, contemporary reality.

A meditative film on a composite A+B image. Image B will be in turn an extract from a film by Vittorio de Sica (DUE DONNE), the sun in the trees, the sea, a cliff, the Traveller Contemplating a Sea of Clouds (Friedrich) or his heirs. When image A is alone on the screen, it is a green theatre. When image B appears inside image A, the gaze is immediately drawn to this smaller image, the cinema image.

Experimental, 16mm

This is my first film based on the unity of the photogram, started in the fall of 1975 and finished at the very beginning of the following year. What to do after Sharits, Kubelka, Kren? How to continue their contribution to cinema? Refusing to accept a cinema where the randomness of images would be the rule, I imagined myself inspired by the musical model. [...] I imagined starting from a fixed photograph that was the vision of my window and building from this image chromatic variations that would select parts of the image. The film was written entirely with the help of a score and was inspired by Steve Reich's repetitive music composition models. [...] - JMB

"Chronoma was conceived as a follow-up to Rythmes 76: its composition is still inspired by the repetitive processes of Steve Reich's music, with their gradual progression. This time, we have a sequence of photographs taken with a motorized camera (a proto movie camera) in a circular movement around a high-voltage electric tower in northern Paris. The initial image is in itself a drawing of lines intersecting to form angles." -JMB