Shown in Compétition #6.
Synopsis
“Sketch XXX (work in progress)” in addition to its “poetic” and “political” content also brings the spectator to his capacity for revolt as an individual before being carried away by an obedient and non-thinking collective membership … The gradual erasure of our antagonistic individual-collective concepts will perhaps help us as individual-collective to imagine that perhaps all the elements of the living being connected this invalidates all “individualist” attempts.
O. Fouchard 04-2020
Text from the selection committee
You’re right dear Olivier, it would be quite pompous to say that your film is “post-lettrist”. Discourses on the “post-this” or “post-that” are always a little suspicious of wanting to draw a line under the great movements of thought, society or culture, etc., in order to, under the pretext of enlightened criticism, pretend to be beyond or above it. This film is Lettrist. Simply, directly, clearly. It articulates a complex set of signs belonging to different registers, languages and codes with a very subtle sense of disorganization, itself a reflection of the complex dialectic between singular and common, individual and collective. All right, this is not thunderous, boisterous Lettrism, only elegant Lettrism, but straightforward.
Translation made by the translator www.DeepL.com/Translator
– F.T.
Critical text
Sketch XXX (work in progress) in addition to its “poetic” and “political” content also leads the spectator to his or her capacity for revolt as an individual before being carried away by an obedient and unthinking collective adherence… The progressive erasing of our antagonistic concepts individual-collective will perhaps help us as an individual-collective to imagine that all the elements of the living are connected, thus affirming all “individualist” attempts. “Individualism” like most “-isms” is a doctrine and a dogma: which requires adherence… Now the Kogi Indians thought : “When one living being of the forest suffers, the whole forest suffers”, But the will of the individual is determining and conditions the sum of the individuals… So the soundtrack was taken from extracts of a radio programme Pour saluer André Breton and this little film that could be a little pompously described as post- Lettrist and post-situationist proposes a reflection on our relationship as individuals within a collective and not as individuals within a collective… But this is only one track that animates the video maker and is not quite the content of the film, but who is looking in that direction too? Trying to get out of one’s own intellectual prison before thinking of escaping from those of others in order to avoid any totalitarian thinking conducive to a hell paved with good intentions?
– Olivier Fouchard
Can you go back over the genesis of your project? What is your creative process? Did it evolve?
Genesis? Let’s rather say that there is a beginning to everything, first in the film Trames I tried to tinker with 35mm film, which I had started in 1986 with the painting in the footsteps of the Artist Pierre Druesne, painter and sculptor and also weave-inventor of new plastic forms to go fast … it’s Trames, a film a little missed when it comes to working on color:
This film was then used in another film that exists in two versions with nuanced titles:
- Carnets d’Ateliers, with Philippe Cote’s voice-over for the inauguration plan before any written credits.
- Filmed notebooks, edited from the previous film but remained in the state of a model because the ambition was to kinescopy it in 16 or 35mm like that to try and add materiality to the whole…
At the same time I was also tinkering with some stuff from the film À bout de souffle by J-L Godard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnvCaj9Y3uU and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-MFeiHighQ.
Then I went back to the original film with a video: Trames 2 All Over. I also started to see differently my hand painted films, which are not numerous : https://lightcone.org/en/film-8372-sol andhttps://lightcone.org/en/film-7268-encres.
Then I started to assemble all these elements together… I also added sound so that it would not necessarily be synchronous : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gRXpNMGO5g, https://lightcone.org/en/film-12052-peintures-esquisse-n1 and https://lightcone.org/en/film-12056-multivers-1.
And finally, my post-literacy escapades took over and I began to mix words, letters and speech. It formed a bit like a developing fetus, or a tree, finally something that is born, lives virtually made of digital information and sooner or later will disappear…
How did you conceptualize your Esquisse XXX?
Conceptualized? No, it’s rather the bits of my brain’s architecture and also the disorder of my emotions that allow me to make films… Finally, I assemble more than I “conceptualize”, it’s a bit like leaving on a painting without really knowing what the outcome will be or even the fall or failure or abandonment or when and how it will end…
How long did it take to develop?
I don’t know, maybe it’s just a step or a branch of the tree… To follow …. Maybe if Esquisse XXX is often shown as the final point, maybe in 3 years I’ll take this file with others to tinker with a new “thing” …. It’s like everything is uncertain, unexpected, sudden, random…