Japon series

Japon series
Japon series

1991, 16 mm., colour, sound, 7 min.

A poetic reworking of a documentary dedicated to a street show by the Japanese Buto dancers which took place in Paris outside the Chatelet metro station in the 1980's. The dancers have shaved heads and are painted entirely white, rendering their naked bodies especially effective in putting together and animating Cécile Fontaine's visual painting, realised with the technique of collage-décollage of layers of emulsion. The green and the blue of the layers removed and manipulated is printed on the white skins of the dancers with an efficiency seen only in the film Peche miraculeuse. As in almost all of her films, Cécile Fontaine made this almost entirely on her own kitchen table, using two different types of adhesive tape (one editing tape to lift the emulsion and one with a double-sided surface to rebuild her collage) and ammonia-based chemical products for domestic cleaning to make it easier to separate the layers of emulsion.