Marc Hurtado : The Infinite Dreamer

From the short film Royaume (1991) to Lydia Lunch’s abrasive portrait My lover the killer (2020), from 8mm film to video, this retrospective looks back at the different cycles and media that make up Marc Hurtado’s cinematic work, the better to celebrate the same vital, creative impulse that runs through it from start to finish. An essential figure on the avant-garde music scene with the group Étant Donnés, co-founded with his brother Éric in 1977, he also produced a series of sublime visual poems shot/edited with an 8mm camera, culminating in Royaume. Initiated at the age of fourteen with Des autres terres souples (1976-1979), this first cycle continued until Blanche in 1996, and is based on an intuitive practice of overprinting, always carried out in the “magic moment of shooting”. The film becomes the site of a luminous encounter between the surrounding nature and the artist’s face, which dissolves into the material to merge with it. Whispered in voice-over and blended with a noisy, sensory sound composition, her poems resemble primitive spells that invoke and exalt the rediscovered unity of the world. Different elements meet, the body mingles with the landscape, the micro with the macrocosm: everything communicates and ignites in an ecstatic experience that opens onto the infinite.

 

Deeply rooted in film and its photochemical recording process, Hurtado’s cinema took a major turn in 2009 with Ciel Terre Ciel, which marked his first use of video - a medium he had long rejected. The 5-minute short was commissioned by Nicole Brenez for the collective film, Outrage et Rébellion, which was initiated in response to the French police violence and repression that caused the young Joachim Gatti to lose an eye during a demonstration in Montreuil. Here, the sun, a central motif of the 8mm period, pierces the center of the frame, flooding it with light and blinding us. It puts the DV camera’s lens to the test, producing a series of imperfections: rainbow iridescences appear, and the star extends into the image, drawing the branches of a star. Hurtado’s interest in video lies in its fragility, technical errors and flaws, while at the same time allowing him to open up and welcome others into his images. The Infinite Mercy (2009) and My Lover the Killer (2020), dedicated respectively to his friends and musical collaborators Alan Vega and Lydia Lunch, transcend the documentary portrait through their plastic prodigality (zooms, fades, blurs, chromatic turns, etc.), capable of capturing the intense energy released by these radiant beings. These black stars become a reflection of the artist himself, all linked by an extreme spiritual and creative affinity. Beyond the change of medium, Hurtad’s work pursues its fusional, unifying horizon, already suggested by his poem Cross, which delivers the alchemical formula of his incandescent cinema:

 

It’s on the cross that I burn my soul

It’s in me that you burn your soul

It’s in you that I burn my soul

It’s on the cross that you burn your soul

It is in me that I burn your soul

It’s in you that you burn my soul

It is in the cross that I burn your soul

It’s in me that you burn my soul

It is in you that I burn your soul

It is in the cross that you burn my soul

It’s in me that I burn my soul

C’est en toi que tu brûles ton âme

 

Text: Robin Vaz