denim and the 2000s
Social & External
A typical experimental film, in which a variety of audiovisual techniques are used to create the sense of polymorphic eroticism as developed by European and Mediterranean cinematography of the 20th century. Combining the methods of “animation” and “live action”, this intricate work embodies the idea of an “ars combinatoria”. The structure is loose, with neither a central axis nor a point where everything converges, contributing greatly to the open-ended character of the film, where rhythm is the key element.
A figure known as "The Assassin" descends from the heavens into a nightmarish pit full of monsters, titans, and cruelty.
Film directed from the play "Orpheon", directed by François Tanguy, played by the Compagny of Raft.
A study of human anxieties about beauty, youth and objectification.
A blind man accidentally loses his guide-dog. Alone in the dark in a big city, he discovers that his strength lies in recognising his own vulnerability.
The climbing of an immense staircase made up of the most varied stairs. Symbolic scenes occur on different levels where characters seem to be prisoners of their deeds and of their own folly. The steep staircase leads little by little towards the zones of great light where human beings and nonhuman beings meet.
Bokanowski returns to the complex - and mind-bending - optical array of pinholes, mirrors, prisms, and refractive substrates of his earlier film, La Plage to create the whimsical and playful Au bord du lac. The film is composed of mundane, everyday scenes of recreation and leisure on an idyllic, sunny day at a park that overlooks a lake - rowing a boat, playing a game of volleyball, rollerskating, bicycling, reading a newspaper, sunbathing, riding on horseback, or strolling on the promenade - shot through optical distortions to create fractured and knotted images that resemble embellished, gothic fairytale illustrations or appear to resolve into morphing, geometric patterns of fluid motion. Evoking the vibrant colors and sun-soaked palette of an invigorated Vincent van Gogh in Arles, Bokanowski transforms the quotidian into an infinitely mesmerizing dynamic kaleidoscope of shape-shifting textures and self-reconstituting objects of organic, abstract art.
A 5 minute, 2D, straight-ahead animated film by Bruce Bickford.
Montage of still photos with lighting effects.
CHERRY AND VIRGIN—a 'nervous romance' about Ryou, a 32-year-old erotic manga artist who has no experience with women, and Ami, a 28-year-old fujoshi who has a bad impression of real men.
A collaborative experiment between 14 artists around the globe. Each artist creates a background, All backgrounds are traded randomly, and then animated upon freely.
Inés travels to India to visit her friend Ámár, who has been living in a mental institution for years. Inés remembers the last days they spent together and her promise to return.
Memories split in the space.
Conceived, drawn and animated live by a team of patients from a psychiatric clinic, this achievement presents, in the eyes of its author, less interest on a purely cinematographic level than on that of human experience. It is the disturbing wordless story of a woman and a man living in a strange setting where objects are endowed with life that they have chosen to tell us through this theater of shadow puppets in cut out figurines. Their characters will know a tragic fate since carried in the air by balloons, they will finally be devoured by a horrible dragon.
Relentlessly reworking ‘real’ images, using techniques borrowed from painting and animated film, Patrick Bokanowski is an author of stature, capable of creating an insane and cataclysmic universe of unquestionable beauty.
"The Role of Chance" ("La part du hasard") focuses exclusively on drawing and painting techniques used by the painter Henri Dimier. Shot over several weeks in the same artist's studio, the film shows works in their different phases, processes rarely explained or little known. It also addresses many practical issues (choice of paper, pigment grinding, reports drawings, put the tiles, cliches, etc) as well as broader questions of method and inspiration (use of space, the role of contours, power of suggestion perspectives, use of random processes). Patrick Bokanowski sought with this film to restore the spirit of this teaching, showing how to bend a note or sometimes revealing an essential mystery of creation.
A housewife is preparing a duck à l'orange in her kitchen. But the reluctant bird tries to escape from her but the woman manages to recaptures it and plucks it savagely. Once the duck is put in the oven, an alligator unexpectedly appears in the kitchen, threatening the cook.
Reworked and colored images of people playing at the seashore.
Behold the struggle between light and dark, the two principles that are at the very heart of the cinematic deed. A Solar Dream takes the seventh art’s ability to generate imaginary and phantasmagorical worlds to the limit, multiplied here by Michèle Bokanowski’s enveloping music. A precious plastic and sonic gem.
