Frédérique Devaux

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Cinexpérimentaux is a series of documentaries on experimental filmmakers, produced and directed by Michel Amarger and Frédérique Devaux. N°8 is dedicated to the most important European cooperative Light Cone created in 1982 in Paris.

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Two-thirds of K (Exil) consists of images of the women and children who remain at home, alone, while the men leave for a life of exile. These images, always fragmentary (either cut-up or inserted piece by piece within the image as a whole), alternating between negative and positive, complementing or contradicting each other - give an insight into the wrenching separation experienced by those members of the population who remain at home, left to their fate in an inhospitable landscape. Over what we call the 'joints', we will engrave words in French or Kabyle (Berber), echoing the masculine voices of Rachid Adel and Michel Amarger. An original composition by Mr. Djamel Tareb will form the musical sound-track for the film.

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K (Acugher/Acimi) (K Pourquoi? Pourquoi?) is the last film of the 'K' series. Each frame of film was placed individually in the printer; the film consists in fact of individual frames, developed one by one (rather than a conventional camera roll), and placed at random on the printing stock. The question posed by the film is: how can one describe the position of the Algerian administration vis-a-vis Kabylie, which has been completely abandoned by central government? It's like a game of poker, is it not ... with the only possible response one of desolation and incomprehension. An original composition by Mr. Djamel Tareb will form the musical sound-track for the film.

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In this part, I'm dealing with the relationship of the Kabyles with the dream of elsewhere. To reach that aim, I shot a lot in Kabilye, and also in other countries. Through superimposition, the approach between the positive and the negative, tape-to-film work, a research into colour and some very tight editing in which I intercalate some articles about the kabyle cauldron, as well as other effects, I try to give shape to these visions of an elsewhere, that are passing, changeable, often false. While printing the film, I worked a lot on the diaphragm, going voluntarily from overexposure to underexposure, in order to render the blindness (that is the fever) and the ignorance of some populations about this elsewhere that they believe is an El Dorado.

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Stéphane Marti is a teacher and film-maker who, since 1976, has been expounding the plasticity of experimental cinema, freeing it from the dominant codes of narrative cinema. An avid defender of Super-8mm film (which he has been using for 30 years), he has fought for the acknowledgement of its excellence as a film-making tool. His work, which screens in festivals and at international events, has been the subject of numerous interviews and articles. Flamboyant, baroque and sensual, his work revolves primarily around the question of the body and the sacred.

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K (Désert) is the forth part of a series on Kabylia, including a documentary and a feature film. K (Désert) examines the fragmentation of a culture (Berber culture) through the Algerian desert populations by means of collage. Shot in 8mm and blown-up on 16mm film, the groundwork has been reworked by layers in the optical printer.

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Marcel Hanoun, one of the most innovative of filmmakers, gives us what he names "a lesson in cinema." Frederique Devaux and Michel Amarger filmed this piece at his country house, composing an abundantly rich portrait. Film clips and sparks of theoretic bravura testify to the feverish creativity and the drunken agitation behind which lurks the ever-composed voice of the filmmaker.

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Les Deux Lucy is a short documentary portrait of the shooting of Raphaël Bassan's film Lucy en miroir. It's the opportunity for us to look at one of our contemporary filmmakers and important film critics of what we call in French cinémas differents, meaning a different way of making films. Our making of offers the opportunity to follow, step by step, the making of this short film with scenes shot on the set, and to listen to comments by the filmmaker about his work.

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16mm experimental short.

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K, for Kabylie, is a chronicle in several parts. Chronicle of a fragmented childhood between two countries, memory shredded by separation and abandonment. Chronicle also of the return, of a country broken by the central power (the demonstrations of the region of Tizi Ouzou in particular made tens of deaths), loneliness of the women and the children who fight each day for their survival. This is my family trajectory but it is above all that of a country with "murderous power" as all Kabyle children and adults sing.

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K3 (Les Femmes) is dedicated to the Kabili women of North Africa. The artist superimposes images and sounds to highlight the difficulty these women face in proclaiming their identity. The film projects activities of Kabili women which usually include the raising of children, the family, and the household. Erased from the exterior society, their marginalisation is depicted through the fading in and out of images and sounds. However, within their own private spaces, they remain loyal, they sing, dance, and resist a society that does not take into account their full value.

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Rose Lowder is an artisan of cinema. Her 16mm camera takes the place of a loom for the weaving of images. She has consecrated her life to these tapestries, these embroideries whose motifs have for many years come from nature, in a state of incessant becoming. Like her elders, the Impressionist painters, she renders her bouquets stroke by stroke, image by image, color after color, to give life to her pointillist compositions in motion.

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K is a chronicle and an experimental biography. Each part of K is centered around a particular problem: childhood, demonstrations in Kabylia, women… At the breaking up of a family (K Il est une fois…) echo the scattered pieces of a Kabylia torn by struggle and demonstrations (K Les Luttes Amazigh), especially in the region of Tizi Ouzou, our family home. Amazigh means Free Man in our language, which is more relevant than ever in this short film.

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Portrait of experimental filmmaker Nicolas Rey.

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Vivian Ostrovsky is a nomad film-maker, born in New York. Student in Brazil then in Paris, which takes its camera of continent in continent since 1980. Her work, in the border of the documentary and the experimental, touches the filmed journals and is interested in the individuals rather than in the masses, in the physical language, in the unusual of the situations and in the sensible editing of the images and the sounds.

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Portrait, alternating interviews and extracted from Pip Chodorov's films who evokes its conception of the experimental movies, the links of some of his films with photography. Their character, sometimes improvised, sometimes composed. He’s and editor's activities of videocassettes Re: Voir.

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Portrait of experimental filmmaker Martine Rousset.

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Image-weaving work, as the film is originally composed of 35mm frames that were later converted to the 16mm format.

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After the bri(n)s and the threads of images, come these fragments, of various shapes, mostly circular, flared or full, with various inclusions, and threads leading back to a more abstract original rhythm. The editing was done directly in the optical printer. The views that I have appropriated are once again found footage chosen according to my convictions: there is thus a certain derision in weaving and interweaving these faces of anonymous and serious men with these youthful and blissful communicants, whose naivety escapes no one. I hope, as I wished, that each image is in itself a painting, on which it is not incongruous to stop for a few quarters of a second.

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A film that would not burn and, above all, from which no print could be made at the time! 1995-1999/16mm/sound.

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From one film to another, it's true that I often use the same images, to remind people, to create a universe, to show that my work basically constitutes a single work. I can also, like here, deepen a procedure used much earlier, in this case in Un film brûlé (1984). I had torn and shifted the images relative to each other (thus creating a long crack) which I had then not been able to shoot, the film being limited to a soundtrack ever since. Here, it is a question of creating in all possible ways holes and ellipses of images then of stitching these views together in an aesthetic mode in a joyous end-of-the-century apocalypse, of positives, negatives, 16mm, Super- 8, 8mm, black and white, color, enhanced, faded, but still found footage...

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"Bri(n) d'images is composed in the form of a mosaic. Playing on the transparency effects of the film and the color inks used, it is more like a stained glass film. This work of plastic composition is accompanied by music itself made of fragments from 'Amériques' by Varèse" — Vincent Deville & Pip Chodorov

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1999, 16mm, 01'30", color, silent, France

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Song of signs with chorus and verses. Superfluity or scattering of the signs confronted by juxtaposition or incrustation, in 16 and Super-8, positive and negative, black and white or colors. These various visual voices constitute a polyphony, the song of the world and of art with its cadences and pulsations of life, a song of signs with echo, reverberation, climax, leitmotif... of images...

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“Smashed up images, beginnings and ends of shots, interventions at different levels, reframings, various formats (8mm, Super 8, 16mm ...), blurred images, flashes of color and light. Crackling visions. Visions and derisions of the filmmaker’s life, filmed in Super-8 and embedded into banal 16mm images from Zorro or porn films. An illusion play of shots reworked on the optical printer. The sound, quieter, like another layer of memory, is filled with well-known songs. Something else thus unfolds in the contrapuntal contrast between picture and sound.”⁠ — Michel Amarger

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