Experimental Short Films: "Avant L’effondrement du Mont Blanc" + "Thing"

Dedicated to the eponymous Mont Blanc massif, the film is accompanied by the director Jacques Perconte’s burning question of whether we happen to be the very last people who will ever have the chance to see Mont Blanc’s summit. It’s all in response to the earth’s rising temperatures, which is causing glaciers to melt at a rapid pace. Perconte's work is unique in the sense that in revealing the inner strength and pulsation of what is seen on screen, he combines a plasticity that follows on the pictorial tradition inherited from painting and experimental film, with documentary film rooted in a specific space.

 

"In his works, Perconte achieves a synthesis in which he finds a response to dialectical tension between the modern concept of techne and physis. These digits of the algorithm are part of the artistic environment, which is tense but also balanced at the same time." — J. Sarmiento Hinojosa
 

Thing
(Anouk De Clercq, 2013, 18 min, Belgium, Digital)

An architect talks about the city he built. We travel through his virtual memory to a boundless, imaginary space. About a place’s memory, about fictitious buildings and the continuation of the past in today’s urban patterns. The architect’s ideas do not take on a particular form, but that does not make them less appealing. Thing reveals an unreliable, yet beautiful reality.

"The technology used in Thing does not allow talking about a camera since it is made of 3D scans of urban spaces. Instead, we could talk about a point of view, a gaze, or even a body (that wanders). Thereby, a tension is generated between the mechanical register of space and its embodied perception. A tension or overlap between two sensing interfaces: the scanner and the body, without any need to determine whether there is a desire to reproduce the mode of sensing of the latter through the technology of the former." — Anna Manubens

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