Vincent Meessen

Movies

Just a Movement
Writer
Juste un Mouvement is a free take on La Chinoise, a Jean-Luc Godard movie shot in 1967 in Paris. Reallocating its roles and characters fifty years later in Dakar, and updating its plot, this new version offers a meditation on the relationship between politics, justice and memory. Although not anymore alive, Omar Blondin Diop, the only actual Maoist student in the original movie, now becomes the key character.
Just a Movement
Director
Juste un Mouvement is a free take on La Chinoise, a Jean-Luc Godard movie shot in 1967 in Paris. Reallocating its roles and characters fifty years later in Dakar, and updating its plot, this new version offers a meditation on the relationship between politics, justice and memory. Although not anymore alive, Omar Blondin Diop, the only actual Maoist student in the original movie, now becomes the key character.
Quelle que soit la longueur de la nuit
Director
Ultramarine
Director
Ultramarine is a visual poem, narrating the 'exile blues' through spoken word performance, improvised rhythms and textile display. It is a poetic essay in repoliticising one of the most universal colours, which also has colonial references. Objects and documents are rendered in words by the Afro-American poet Kain, voiced in music improvised by drummer Lander Gyselinck and animated in images by Vincent Meessen. Ultramarine is composed like a spectrum: it unfolds and intertwines fragments of meaning.
One.Two.Three
Writer
This work explores the unknown participation of Congolese intellectuals in the Situationist International movement, especially the student M'Belolo who wrote a protest song in May 1968.
One.Two.Three
Director
This work explores the unknown participation of Congolese intellectuals in the Situationist International movement, especially the student M'Belolo who wrote a protest song in May 1968.
Vita Nova
Director
In Mythologies (1957), Roland Barthes first presented his renowned critical analysis of the cover of a 1955 issue of Paris Match—the iconic image of a young African cadet saluting the French flag. What haunts this famous analysis? When Belgian artist Vincent Meesen went in search of the then-cadet for his film Vita Nova (2009), he found an old African who had forgotten almost all of the French national anthem. As Meessen’s investigation reveals, Barthes himself “forgot” to mention the history of his own family’s relation to colonialism, particularly the history of his grandfather, Captain Louis-Gustave Binger, who “gave” Côte d'Ivoire to France. The film launches a critical and moving account of the specters that haunted one of France’s most enlightened cultural critics, and have yet to be fully acknowledged today.