Fabrice Lauterjung

Le 10 août 1936, James Joyce écrivait une lettre à son petit-fils, Steven. Il y est question de la ville de Beaugency, d’un pont et de celui qui devait le construire : le diable…

A love story amid texts, images and sounds.

A script – about a man who leaves messages to a woman who never answers – applies captions to interrupt the stream of images taken from Super-8 film reels that were allegedly lost and then found again. An echo effect is created by the presence of sound recordings, which were perhaps also lost and found. Re the images: a bedroom, an apartment, streets, bridges, passersby, meandering through a Russian city, Saint-Petersburg. Re the soundtrack: city-noises, the subway, the street, Orthodox chants.

The title is borrowed from a line by the Russian poet Olga Bergholtz: “Don’t go back there, towards this snow, towards this night, the gaze of someone who awaits you.”

The film is underscored by the motif of fragmentation, and pursues a broader project on bridges, which can architecturally represent language as a bond that separates. The project was launched with the film Invitation to a voyage.

A love story amid texts, images and sounds.

A script – about a man who leaves messages to a woman who never answers – applies captions to interrupt the stream of images taken from Super-8 film reels that were allegedly lost and then found again. An echo effect is created by the presence of sound recordings, which were perhaps also lost and found. Re the images: a bedroom, an apartment, streets, bridges, passersby, meandering through a Russian city, Saint-Petersburg. Re the soundtrack: city-noises, the subway, the street, Orthodox chants.

The title is borrowed from a line by the Russian poet Olga Bergholtz: “Don’t go back there, towards this snow, towards this night, the gaze of someone who awaits you.”

The film is underscored by the motif of fragmentation, and pursues a broader project on bridges, which can architecturally represent language as a bond that separates. The project was launched with the film Invitation to a voyage.

At a command post – the film’s sole setting – which overlooks the lift bridge of the town Martigues against the backdrop of passing boats, a man tells the story of a certain Thomas, who decided to learn Persian from a mysterious captain. After a long apprenticeship, by now convinced that he has reached sufficient mastery, Thomas ventures to write a text of his own, at which point he discovers that the language he’d ostensibly been learning is nonexistent. The bridge turns into an architectural and symbolic representation of language as a bond that separates.

Over the span of a year or so, training sessions were filmed at a boxing club in the Petite Hollande district of Montbéliard. Adults and children, whether beginners or advanced, repeat the same motions, honing their style and developing physical prowess. Boxing bag workouts, combat simulations, lessons in new punches, new moves and fight techniques. Beyond boxing, it’s all about sport as ritual.

At Marseille’s open-sea port (also called “pier of oblivion”), where ships remain docked for long periods, one comes across inscriptions left by sailors, including three Chinese ideograms. Along the path of inquiry, a tale is woven about a Taiwanese ship, which, being listed in a marine registry, has given rise to various conjectures.

The story of an experiment conducted on the corpse of a young man condemned to die by guillotine. The left eye’s retina revealed an image that was deemed “precise yet ambiguous”. The film enacts this incident by way of captions interspersed with series of images seen through a Super-8 viewer, to a rhythm that resembles blinking. The images bear no apparent relationship to the experiment. A female voice-over reminisces about the written text while the captions and images are screened, thereby creating a strange polysemy. The account of this experiment draws inspiration from photo-optical research on the optogram carried out by the German physiologist Wilhelm Kühne as well as by Dr. Auguste Gabriel Maxime Vernois, who had published an article in the medical photo-journal of the Hospitals of Paris entitled Étude photographique sur la rétine des sujets assassinés (1870).

Two young women (professional dancers), discover by the use of their hands, the open, gaping, empty surface of a musical instrument case, and the hollow form of its vacant instrument. The recollection of this tactile experience gave way to a speech, which in turn was transcribed in Braille and then read by a young, blind woman. The film articulates itself around the moment when the hands explore the case, to the voice of the young, blind woman reading the text in Braille. The background music consists of the stuttering ejaculations of a musical score (played by a saxophone).

An elegy of a motif, constructed out of words, images and sounds, brought to light in Eric Suchère's book, "Fixe, désole en hiver". A train journey in search of a woman's silhouette, seen against the light, her back to us, facing the distant sea and hills on the horizon.

Initially an experiment about ‘the eye and memory’, calling on volunteers and initially consisting of a presentation of a short film.
Secondly, the volunteers were asked to present what they remembered about the film. If necessary, photos taken of the film were presented to them and classified in a chronological order. One of the volunteers, after recognising the place where the film was shot, remembered a personal trauma, an alert experienced one night during the war in ex-Yugoslavia.

A film-still is exposed to the gaze of a young woman, she knows nothing about the film's origin or history, she simply comments on this singular, frozen-frame. Progressively her speech escapes her, taking on a new direction. This is an 'out-of-frame' story, a meander within an image and then into a film, a nomadic stroll through the city. The film was inspired by the TAT (Thematic Apperception Test), a projective psychoanalysis test, in which patients are confronted by a series of images and from which they are asked to imagine a story.

A landscape passes by, filmed in Super 8, the image vacillates between black and white and colour, revealing streets and then buildings. The setting, Berlin. The film, a meander in what seems to be an aimless progression, with no preestablished route and moving in fits and starts. A text appears, inscribed in white lettering, it scrolls upwards; it tells the story of a narrator, who, living in the west of Berlin, communicated using bodily gestures to a man living opposite, but whose building was situated in the east, on the other side of the wall. A formal counterpoint to the Super 8’s logorrhoea, both text and image act against each other; the text becomes an obstacle, passing in front of the image like a wall, it induces the spectator’s imagination. 

An account of a hypothetical encounter with a former Turkish film director in Istanbul, November 15th, 2003. While projecting four of his super-8 films he tells the story of his city, explains his beginnings in cinema, how he learnt to speak French. He makes reference to a tower on which countless messages in every language were inscribed and reveals the existence of a fifth film...

An experiment into cinematographic narration and its most minimal structure: the photogram (according to the theory of Peter Kubelka). The film attempts, via a series of projected images, to recreate a rythmic meandering through the city of Paris.

The film is constructed from three narrative layers operating in palimpsest.

It all starts with photographs taken by Louis Sclavis and everything starts from them. In this, they are these inductive photos of the title.

They appear for the most part enlarged, as if observed with a magnifying glass, according to the logic of an investigation whose stakes remain mysterious. To their fixity responds a sequence which is repeated throughout the film, declined according to different rhythms. At first abstract, the white form that unfolds there guesses to be a swan. To this are added the fragments of a text, scrolling, disseminated in the space of the screen. They are residues of Mimesis, written by Stéphane Mallarmé. The shot of the swan, also of Mallarméan influence, refers as much to Loïe Fuller’s serpentine dance as to the poem The Virgin, Vivacious and Lovely Today. Everything operates in ricochets, the photos leading to the swan leading to the text, leading the film towards a quest for white – last ricochet towards a 19th century literary obsession, of the Ultima Thule fantasized by Edgar Allan Poe in his Narratives of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket to the whiteness of Moby Dick by Herman Melville.

The film is constructed from three narrative layers operating in palimpsest.
It all starts with photographs taken by Louis Sclavis and everything starts from them. In this, they are these inductive photos of the title.
They appear for the most part enlarged, as if observed with a magnifying glass, according to the logic of an investigation whose stakes remain mysterious. To their fixity responds a sequence which is repeated throughout the film, declined according to different rhythms. At first abstract, the white form that unfolds there guesses to be a swan. To this are added the fragments of a text, scrolling, disseminated in the space of the screen. They are residues of Mimesis, written by Stéphane Mallarmé. The shot of the swan, also of Mallarméan influence, refers as much to Loïe Fuller’s serpentine dance as to the poem The Virgin, Vivacious and Lovely Today. Everything operates in ricochets, the photos leading to the swan leading to the text, leading the film towards a quest for white – last ricochet towards a 19th century literary obsession, of the Ultima Thule fantasized by Edgar Allan Poe in his Narratives of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket to the whiteness of Moby Dick by Herman Melville.

After the first part placed under Mallarmé’s “swan”, a second, more colourful, which progressed to the rhythm of the hands of a blind woman reading a letter from Diderot in Braille, the third and final part takes us into a series images in black and white: first a forest from which flies a flight of birds, abstract shapes that turn out to be faces, then a round of children dancing around a fire. In rhythmic and pictorial counterpoint appear the moving, though jerky images of a woman in a red dress. She is dancing, soon joined by a man wearing a black suit. A few isolated sentences and words scroll in varied rhythms, as possible residual traces of a bursting of the text from which they were taken – In Praise of makeup by Charles Baudelaire. Gradually, the patterns in colour and those in black and white meet and blend.

This work was commissioned by the Musée des Confluences in Lyon in partnership with the Planetarium of Vaulx-en-Velin for a conference on exobiology. One at a time, scientists speak onstage, expounding viewpoints and analyses. Their talks are interspersed with three musical moments played by a string quartet. The music unfolds in search of a motif, and gradually fuses with the short film sequences being projected. On a second screen, like a continuous décor-in-motion, a film depicts an attempt to solve a puzzle. The first pieces are placed. Hands falter, start over, rectify… The image gradually takes shape before our eyes.

Three musicians, two on saxophone and one on electroacoustic keyboard, play onstage while images are screened. The shots are of New York in 1970 and 2003. Texts are superimposed over the images – ekphrastic descriptions of four paintings by James McNeill Whistler on display at the Frick Collection, located 1 East 70th Street, New York.

Onstage, a pianist plays together with his screened self. He and his “double” interact according to the musical principle of the fugue. An encounter between a copy and its original, co-dependently fleshing out the composition.

Contemporary reinterpretation of Situationist Psychology, constructed on the notion of territoriality.
The film, entirely composed of archive images of the city Saint-Étienne, weaves a network of relationships (formal, symbolic, rhythmic,…), exposing the aspect of archives that goes beyond the purely informative function and becomes a mnemonic device.

The tale of a shot/countershot. Two paintings face one another: Episode of the Retreat from Russia by Nicolas Toussaint Charlet and Last Words of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius by Eugène Delacroix. In between them are two people facing the Delacroix, one describing it while the other, who is blind, listens. The words convey the face-to-face interplay of the paintings: the fall of two empires (Napoleonic and Roman).

Vacant Mirror is made up of shots depicting the relationship to otherness through the specular image. The film is a double projection (simultaneous) on two screens. The process provokes a dialogue between the sequences; first around formal analogies based on an optical inversion giving the illusion of a “mirrored” projection, then, this illusion shattering, formal inconsistencies lead the film towards narrative analogies. So rather than a double projection, these are two films screened side by side, inseparable from each other and interweaving. The twin function of the process emphasizes the indispensable complementarity of the two screens, and the irrevocable isolation that the images provoke.

Two intertwining stories. The first involves a little girl, filmed from behind, facing the sea, in a single slow-motion shot, giving the impression of a still image. However, very slowly the sea-foam shifts and the girl moves. The second resembles an old holiday film, a series of insignificant unplanned things: a beach resort, the sea, a boat, palm trees, a kite, a beach, rocks, foam, night, windswept trees, hills, a woman seen from behind, her blond hair blowing in the wind, waves.