CinéCollages
Matthieu Orléan

This program was conceived and produced as a continuation of the exhibition Scrapbooks, dans l’imaginaire des cinéastes, which I curated at the Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles in 2023.

A scrapbook is a collage notebook: a collection of cut-out press images, drawings, and precious and rare photographic prints, assembled without any attempt to tell a story or follow a logical order. Many filmmakers have kept one alongside their films – before, during, or after production – as a personal diary made of images rather than words. Challenging banal and hollow representations, the scrapbooks of these countercultural filmmakers are revolutionary works that critique conventional devices of storytelling. Without a center of gravity, suspense, or premeditation, they possess an undeniably utopian dimension. The six short films brought together here share this spirit: a free, personal approach to filmmaking, in direct contact with the sparks of the unconscious, far removed from the traditional logic of film production.

Chronologically, the program opens with Duo Concertantes (1964), an animated film by American filmmaker Larry Jordan, conceived as a small “theater of the mind”. By cutting out and animating, frame by frame, old nineteenth-century Victorian engravings, he composes a dreamlike, childlike love poem dedicated to his wife, the artist Patricia Topalian-Jordan (who appears in the film’s second part as an animated photographic silhouette). An echo in motion of the surrealist scrapbooks kept at the time by their friends, the poet Robert Duncan and the artist Jess.

Next comes Studio Bankside (1971), the first short film by British painter and filmmaker Derek Jarman, who would go on to make Caravaggio (1986) and Blue (1993). Shot and edited in-camera on Super 8 in his studio on the banks of the Thames, the film marks the beginning of a double creative life: until his death, Jarman would keep around thirty sketchbooks with gold-embellished covers, in which he would blend memories, occult symbols, and queer activism.

In 1988, actor Pierre Clémenti – who first came to prominence in films by Buñuel and Bertolucci – directed Soleil, his most intimate film, in which he revisits his unjust imprisonment in Italy. Through a hallucinatory editing, he pays tribute to the painter and patron Marie-Laure de Noailles, with whom he shared a creative passion for collage.

A Thanksgiving Prayer (1991), barely three minutes long, yet a shock of searingly subversive impact. In close-up, Gus Van Sant films writer William S. Burroughs, a figure of the Beat Generation and the inventor of the “cut-up”, a writing technique based on random cutting and rearrangement. Facing the camera, the writer intones in his raspy voice, with sarcasm, the “blessings” of an America that has betrayed its ideals and become a sanctuary for the KKK, Prohibition, homophobia, and violence.

In Leur Histoire (2014), French artist Valérie Mréjen films a couple seated at a restaurant table, exchanging banalities, while images of cities and landscapes taken from postcards begin to intrude upon their conversation, revealing what lies beneath the words. The sentences they exchange form perhaps the chaotic whole of the already long history they have lived together. Or that they are planning to live. The doubt remains.

The program concludes with Bertrand Mandico’s flamboyant Ultra Pulpe (2018), which premiered at Cannes. In an abandoned seaside resort, at the end of a shoot, a filmmaker detains her actress by telling her five twilight tales, somewhere between science fiction and macabre poetry. Mandico, who always shoots on film, has also kept prolific scrapbooks since 2010, combining stills from his films, erotic magazines, and hand-painted drawings – an art form he compares to a “knife thrust into the ribs”.

Six films, six intimate diaries rendered in images by men and women who were also visual artists, writers, or even actors: so many windows onto the other side of cinema, with a declared taste for provocation. For each of them, the aim is to reveal a polyphonic and subjective autofiction that operates according to a principle of montage: between amateurism and the technological, the emotional and the social, the intimate and the political.