Jean-Michel Bouhours

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.

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.

No description available.

Avante is a folioscope. Designed as an installation, it can also be shown as a film. Avante was an ideologically reactionary Spanish textbook from the 1940s. This film is a neutralization through drawing and movement.

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

To construct a film in an atomic way, starting from simple elements which combined with each other will produce a whole. Taking the dot as an elementary unit is not a coincidence if we think that the notion of pixels with video images began to occupy people's minds in the 70’s, decades before the arrival of giant led screens. [...] 9, and then 16 screens within one same screen allow an impressive process of simultaneous abstract sequences. The film partition shows a combinatorial process between monochrome colours in the background and pointillist compositions in the foreground. As many sequences as screens; each one is a reflection on abstract images: pointillism, geometrism, "nuagisme" or informal abstraction , are all nods to the history of abstraction in painting: Vassili Kandinsky, Paul Klee, or Augusto Giacometti seem to have been called together within a mondrianesque grid. JMB

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.

No description available.

No description available.

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.

Experimental, 16mm

The history of modern painting includes white paintings . So why not a "white film"? This film includes images, from the oldest Romanesque cloister in Aragon, dating from the 10th century. These are diaphanous images, devoid of temporality and materiality, bordering on visibility. The repetitive and evanescent character is peculiar to a meditative state, to an illumination. The rhythm is that of the metamorphoses of the shapes of the clouds.

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.

"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

No description available.

Immediately after the screening of CHANTILLY at the MBXA (Paris) on November 8, 1976, we began a new film project, continuing to explore the concomitance of several simultaneous images within the framework of the cinematographic image, but which, freed from the orthogonal grid of the previous film, would be able to move freely in space: they would collide.

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

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.

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.

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