Dreaming up a film. Setting out the fragments of an upcoming, unfinished film in space. On paper, sketching out the characters of a fable that traces the visionary promises of language, from Braille to telepathy, from paroptic vision to the invention of the Theremin in the 1920s: reading with your hands, seeing with your skin, touching without contact… there you have it, a bundle of unfulfilled utopias that make up the potential archive of a possible cinema. Dreaming up a film. Imagine it separated from its original body, divorced from its inherent technology and customary devices. Paper cinema, spoken cinema, cinema by other means, expanded cinema, virtual cinema.
For many years, Érik Bullot has been questioning the transformations of an unstable and constantly metamorphosing art form, from optical toys to the radical change that has meant the definitive establishment of the digital. What is cinema today? If it is no longer an imprint of light captured on a photochemical medium, if its uses and functions have definitively mutated, if its images have burst out across a sea of screens, from phones to galleries, is it still what we have known throughout the twentieth century? Disregarding (and moving past) its repeatedly proclaimed death, the artist and theorist reflects on the developments, limits and specificities associated with cinema – technological, social, aesthetic, institutional. To what extent will it be able to negotiate the terms of such a metamorphosis without denying its identity asks the author of Le Film et son double [Film and its Double]. To what extent is it able to be diffracted, like the light in a kaleidoscope?
In this exhibition at the Filmoteca, Bullot updates the hypothesis of a living and dematerialised cinema by means of a poetic essay and a rigorously documented investigation of some of the obsessions and chimeras that cinema has outgrown. The proposal includes two previously unseen installations alongside works by Ramón y Cajal, August Strindberg, Vicente Huidobro, Roland Sabatier and Jakob Mohr, as well as in different formats, spanning collage, the moving image, photography and illustration, plus a series of programmes that will accompany the exhibition in the form of screenings, discussions, readings and a performative conference.
The event will also mark the launch of the second volume of our Apunts de cinema [Notes on Cinema] series of publications, an essay in twenty-four fragments that combines a speculative exercise with scholarly research.
“By closing our eyes, our mental cinema is projected onto the screen of our eyelids. The film will be imaginary, or it will not be.”
(Érik Bullot)
Marina Vinyes Albes (curator)
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[@Roger Vailland, ca 1927-1932. René Maublanc Collection]
