Autoportrait au dispositif

Autoportrait au dispositif

1981, 16 mm, colour, silent, 7 min.

This film makes use of a specific device made from a strip of paper with vertical fissures which runs - moved by the film maker's own hands - forward and backward. Primitive mechanisms for reproducing moving images are inevitably called to mind, the technological ingenuity of the first "cinema machines", those which broke up the movement of the image and reconstructed it with a simplicity and a purity which today's cinema has lost. It was made with a colour negative "aged" for many years in the film maker's refrigerator, left much later than the "use by" date printed on the box. The result is a greenish colour, the last memory of a lost chromatism.
The film of this "self portrait" was exposed four times, first passing through the machines in both directions, inverting the head and tail of the tape, and then on both faces, inverting the right hand side with the left. The multiplication of images shown in the self portrait is amplified by the fact that the images were taken in front of a large mirror. Another, smaller, mirror can be found behind the subject, with the effect of reproducing the image infinitely, a metaphor for the infinite accumulation of layers of the image. The mirror becomes part of the device itself, in the same way as the "simulated" shutter crosses the strip of perforated paper, subject and at the same time object of the act of representing.