Christian Lebrat

Cinématon

Gérard Courant

Gérard Courant, Alain-Alcide Sudre

Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.

Reseaux

Christian Lebrat

The densest film of the divided-frame group is the aptly titled 1978 Networks, which includes as many as 20 exposures of the same roll of film. Here only one slit was used, but Lebrat combines within one image many narrow strips taken at diverse Paris locations, sometimes seen through colored filters. The enclosed, even claustrophobic space of the strips contrasts with Lebrat’s superimposition of them and with the movement within the strips and by the strips within the frame... (Fred Camper)

V3 (Collapse)

Christian Lebrat

Swallowed in the emptiness with a dull and gloomy noise, the face gradually vanishes with a recurring rocking motion.

Autoportrait au Dispositif

Christian Lebrat

"In the 1990 text on his film Autoportrait au dispositif (1981), Lebrat wrote that all his films are in fact self-portraits, including those that are abstract colour films, and the Rothko's painting are the most beautiful examples of self-portraiture in twentieth century art. lebrat notes that the impetus behind self-portraiture comes out of his desire to create another image of his body, which does not necessarily have to be its representation but can suggest another satte of being, for example the infinite and transcendent state aims at overcoming the problem of corps morcelé and mortal flesh." Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof

Trama

Christian Lebrat

"In Trama, Lebrat divides a surface vertically to be filmed in six equal segments of color (yellow, red, blue, green, violet, orange). The composition stays exactly the same all the way through the film. The filmmaker puts a band on the side of every two or three frames. Constructed step-by-step, using ten bands, the optical mixture of color induces strange pulsating effects." Raphaël Bassan

V4 (It Could Happen to You)

Christian Lebrat, Giovanna Puggioni

Filmed unexpectedly on the port of Genoa, the jazz music resonates with the lights of the city. The video loop, multiplied and worked on during the editing, induces in the spectator a kind of spatio-temporal hypnosis reinforced by the light patterns that change status and the "depth" of the sound recorded live...

Organisation III

Christian Lebrat

First works with pure color. The slits are organized into vertical Yellow-Red-Blue strips which move laterally across the screen according to a pre-calculated order.

Film Numero Deux

Christian Lebrat

For the films in which Lebrat divided the screen he placed a piece of paper with one or more slits in it in front of the lens, allowing only a narrow strip of imagery to register. He then exposed the film multiple times, layering images. The initial effect is confusion—it’s often hard to identify from these moving slits what we’re seeing. But soon the eyes acclimate, and when one does recognize fragments of a nude woman (Lebrat’s wife) in a landscape in Film Number Two (1976), she has the quality of an apparition. Shown in a different way than thousands of years of nudes have led us to expect, this woman is charged with a vital, surprising erotic energy. (Fred Camper)

Liminal Minimal (I & II)

Christian Lebrat

To come back to abstraction, I have a feeling that colour varies in my work between two aspects: the colour-object that comes from the sensation of an object, in this case the film strip, and the opening. This colour-object permits the transporting of objects into space, to explore the space of the screen in the theatre; this is what allowed me to develop Liminal Minimal (1977) by enlarging the space of projection with two projectors and, taking into account that the vertical strips evolve on a black background comparable to the darkness of the theatre, I was able explore the whole space of the projection with the coloured strip

Cinématon XVI

Gérard Courant

Christian Lebrat, Pavlina Zheleva

Reel 16 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series.

Organisation II

Christian Lebrat

In Organisation II, the vertical colored strips (red, yellow, and blue) whose height matches that of the screen move laterally while flickering on and off.

Couleurs délicieuses sur fond bleu

Christian Lebrat

Anamorphoses of television images combined with fragments from Jerome Bosch’s Garden of Delights painting.

Vernazza-Études

Christian Lebrat

Prosper Hillairet

Melba Film Coop

Dominique Willoughby

Guy Fihman, Claudine Eizykman

Short documentary offering glimpses at the life and work of the coop.

V1 (Tourbillons)

Christian Lebrat

Filmed at night, with no manipulation. The hypnotic effect of the image, composed of abstracts motifs, in dialogue with the enigmatic sound track, ponctuated by micro-sound events.

Organisation I

Christian Lebrat

First works with pure color. The slits are organized into vertical Yellow-Red-Blue strips which move laterally across the screen according to a pre-calculated order.