Visual artist and composer
Écrans aims to illustrate the relations between cinema and death. Many thinkers have studied cinema from the perspective of “spectrality”, making it the ghostliest of arts, notably because of its particular temporality which intertwines past and present, as if the time of shooting came to ‘haunt’ the time of viewing.
To this end, the sounds surrounding the tombstones of five filmmakers from Quebec were recorded. Each recording was then used to make an audio-reactive luminous frame flicker, through a device that transformed sound into light. The frame was installed in five locations on Quebec territory where the five filmmakers’ works were once shot. These interventions in the landscape were each time documented on video at dusk.
The resulting shots last 40 minutes, allowing first to see the frame planted in the landscape, then, as the image darkens, to see it transforming into a simple rectangle of light seemingly floating in space. This rectangle of light can, by its shape, bring to mind the archetypal shape of the cinema screen or the auto-focusing collimator visible in the viewfinders of many video or photo cameras. As for the twinkling light, it evokes one of the fundamental principles of cinema: the palpitation of light creating the illusion of movement.
The creation of this work was made possible thanks to the financial support of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.