Writers make films

IMEC / LUX – Caen
October to November 2010

TO CELEBRATE THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF LUX CINEMA, IMEC IS PARTNERING WITH LE PEUPLE QUI MANQUE TO PRESENT A CYCLE OF FILMS ENTITLED ” WRITERS MAKE FILMS”.

Many poets and writers have seized the camera to pursue their artistic adventure elsewhere. Far from stopping at the question of literary adaptation for the cinema, the “Writers Filming” cycle explores the practices of artists who, at the crossroads of literary and cinematographic experimentation, are renewing the very forms of cinema.

Returning to the radical undertakings of the avant-gardes (from cut-up, to sound and visual poetry, to situationist détournement), this cycle takes note of the undertakings to destroy or revolutionize cinema that have emanated from a literary outside (from Guy Debord‘s incandescent cinema, to Alain Jouffroy‘s abolition of art, via Georges Perec‘s decomposition or Marguerite Duras‘s dissociations). Also focusing on contemporary cinema, at the crossroads of documentary aesthetics, poetry and art, this cycle offers an opportunity to discover the video works of poets Patrick Bouvet, Pierre Alferi and Charles Pennequin, and writers and visual artists Edouard Levé and Valérie Mréjen. Tribute will also be paid to the cinemas of Hervé Guibert and David Wojnarowicz, and to Jean Genet‘s “poetry cinema”, precursors of a “third cinema” that made self-reporting the locus of self-politics. Finally, filmmaker and playwright Eugène Green‘s incandescent Toutes les Nuits will close this cycle in baroque mode. Artists, writers, historians and theorists are all involved in this 5-evening program, to discover or rediscover the other side of cinema invented by writers and poets.

Featured artists & writers: Hervé Guibert / David Wojnarowicz / Jean Genet / Guy Debord / Alain Jouffroy / Antony Balch – William Burroughs – Brion Gysin – Ian Sommerville / Bernard Heidsieck & Françoise Janicot / Henri Chopin / John Giorno & Antonello Faretta / Valérie Mréjen / Edouard Levé & Véronique Aubouy / Patrick Bouvet / Pierre Alferi / Charles Pennequin / Marie Sochor / Marguerite Duras / Georges Perec & Bernard Queyssanne / Eugène Green

In 2008, visual artist Jean-Jacques Lebel and the IMEC (Institut Mémoires de l’Edition Contemporaine) presented a fine exhibition at the Abbaye d’Ardennes entitled Les écrivains dessinent, devoted to writers’ drawings, and this cycle is a response to that exhibition.

A program conceived and proposed by Aliocha Imhoff & Kantuta Quiros / le peuple qui manque