Clarisse Hahn
1973 (51 год)Confronting the intensity of the body as flesh, as meat, as phantasm, in the organicness accommodated by rituals and social constructs but which ultimately resists all symbolization, without judging or even describing anything, Clarisse Hahn’s films lash the palpitation of life in the raw. Each of them overexposes a somatic state that is simultaneously biologically ordinary and socially extreme. In 1999, "Hôpital" (Hospital) explores illness and death; in 2000 and 2003, the diptych formed by "Ovidie" and "Karima" is devoted to sexual practices and displaying them; in 2005, "Les Protestants" (The Protestants) serves to complement that work in the concomitant field of the practices of modesty and decency. In the descriptive frankness, all normativeness disappears, therefore all deviancy does too; the only things left are singularities, individualized or dealt with in clusters.
From 2009, this great documentary force began to serve the Kurdish cause, and popular struggles more generally: firstly with the intimate "Kurdish Lover" (2010), then with the trilogy "Notre Corps est une arme" (Our Body Is A Weapon, 2011), shown both as an installation and a traditional projection. Clarisse Hahn is empowered by a political consciousness, gained by diving headlong into the world and carrying out positive research into the shades of meaning produced by the violence of the indisputable appearance of others, as she tackles the watershed of fiction. First of all with "Queridos Amigos" (Dear Friends, 2013), where the counterpoint of documentary images and letters written by Thomas Clerc produces novel narrative effects, tempered with melancholy, in this body of work previously fiercely dedicated to the immediacy of presence; then with the lengthy preparation of a fiction film devoted to the past of Kurdish resistance, a past that has no images and hence requires the working out of proper forms of representation, in the political, elective meaning of that word. (Nicole Brenez - Politiques de la présence, June 2018)
Kurdish Lover
Clarisse Hahn
The Kurdish lover is Oktay, the man with whom I share my life. We went to his village in Kurdistan, a region brought to a standstill by war. At this place, loving someone can become confused with having a hold over them. It is with humor that the characters featured in this film find ways, within their community, to affirm that they truly exist. A shaman goes into trance in front of the television, a hermit dreams of marriage, a shepherdess wants to leave the top of the mountain, soldiers watch over the village, a man from Europe goes off to request the hand of a young woman. It is through these situations that we discover the reality of families doing what they can to find a way of living together, to take the best – or the worst – from each moment.
Kurdish Lover
Karima
Clarisse Hahn
Karima is a young dominatrix whom I filmed in the intimacy of her family, with her friends, and during sessions. Karima’s sadomasochistic practice has a maternal and generous propensity. The body appears alternately as a source of pleasure and pain, an object of adoration or disgust, a vehicle for emotions or an impenetrable border.
Karima
LOS DESNUDOS — Notre corps est une arme
Clarisse Hahn
Landless Mexican peasants invent a new shape of fight by using their body as place of political and social resistance. Since the government does not want to recognize their existence, they will demonstrate completely naked in the streets of Mexico City, twice a day, until they are proved right.
LOS DESNUDOS — Notre corps est une arme
Hôpital
Clarisse Hahn
What kind of habits does one develop when confronted with extreme situations on a daily basis ? In a geriatric department, the management of this borderline state becomes the structuring element of everyday life. The staff focuse on technical gestures to keep bodies at bay. Nurses use a specialized vocabulary, which serves less to express a feeling than to domesticate the violence of it, reducing the disorder of emotions to a reduced number of formulas. Patients use devious means to assert their independence. A woman fiercely refuses to take a shower. This is an ultimate form of resistance, to feel that she still has decision-making power over her body. Raymond withdraws to an inner world. He creates stories about the objects he sees in his room, confusing past and present, dreams and reality.
Hôpital
Rituels
Clarisse Hahn
Rituels brings together five channels of video moving from a pro-Palestinian demonstration in the Paris streets to a private S&M soirée in the same city, to its suburbs and a Kurdish community gathering, then far away to a Mexican hilltop, and to Turkish Kurdistan.
Rituels
Ovidie
Clarisse Hahn
Ovidie
Ovidie is a nineteen years old X actress. For a year, I accompanied her on film shootings and in her private life. With her, I question the different modes of relation to others : the touch, the language, the complexity of relationships when work, sex, love and friendship coexist.
Ovidie
PRISONS — Notre corps est une arme
Clarisse Hahn
Two young women used their own body as a war weapon by participating in a hunger strike in the Turkish prisons in the year 2000. This hunger strike was repressed in a bloody way by the army. Between portraits and archives images, a reflection on the resistance and the sacrifice of the individual in front of the violence of the State.
PRISONS — Notre corps est une arme
GERILLA — Notre corps est une arme
Clarisse Hahn
The Kurdish rebels films their own everyday life on the border of Iraq and Turkey. An almost organic camera records the sensations. The war images in Kurdistan confront with the images of Kurdish refugees in the streets of Paris, questioning various strategies of construction of a community identity, tinged with idealism and with romanticism in the heart of the political and social violence.
GERILLA — Notre corps est une arme
