Martine Rousset

Martine Rousset

Birth : 1951-05-29, Montpellier, France

History

Born on May 29, 1951 in Montpellier, Martine Rousset resided in Sète, France until 1975. She studied Philosophy of Cinema at the Université Paul Valery of Montpellier. As a director, she focuses on light and script. She has worked in cinema since 1977, and has been working as an expert beside Suzanne Pagé since 1978 in the audiovisual department of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris. She has attended various festivals such as Festival of Berlin (1980), MNAM, Paris (1989), Berkeley (1990), MoMA, New York (1995), Feminale, Cologne (1992/1994/1996), Osnabrück (1996), IMPACT (1996), Oberhausen (1998), Scratch (1998/2001/2003), Riga (2002), Pesaro (2003), Los Angeles Film Forum (2004), Festival des cinémas differents, Paris (2005), La Enana Marrón, Madrid (2005), Rencontre des labos de Bruxelles (2005), 10 ans de l'Abominable (2006), Taiwan Women in the Arts (2007), Les Inattendus, Lyon (2007), Belgrade Alternative Film Festival (2008), Les Écrans Documentaires (2008).

Profile

Martine Rousset
Martine Rousset

Movies

Train
Director
Listen to the trace, over the absent times, from the shore, at the very edge of the page, in the blind corner where the reader is held, give a voice, as one throws a net.
Ombres
Director
Wandering through Central Asia, the Caucasus, Kurdistan… to Istanbul. Cities and trains, steppes and snow, down there where the pulse of time evaporates; a very simple film, a navigation, attention letting yourself be taken to the threshold of time going, by hazardous paths... and very slow skies, up to the black sea, where Istanbul is absent, hides under the steps, leaves the place empty, abandons in its wake times undecided.
Rue Pouchkine
Director
"Yerevan, Armenia, in the illegible secret of the country, imprisoned in its shadows, in its nights of the underground, nights of the basements, trains for nowhere... ephemeral traveler, light sleeper..."
Vangölü ekspresi
Director
Filmmaker's visual diary aboard the Vangolu Express.
Anatolia
Cinematography
Rousset photographs a train station in the evening, then boards a late-night train bound for mountainous Anatolia.
Anatolia
Director
Rousset photographs a train station in the evening, then boards a late-night train bound for mountainous Anatolia.
Crépuscule aux Aresquiers
Director
Night is falling the landscape is disappearing leave the world and its memory the night, rags in its wake last page.
Chemins
Director
The unfinished Julien Gracq text, the road 1970, a forest near the sea, the enigma of a trajectory, by this text in this lanscape and this landscape in this text, it's diging, since a double echo to a same root, deep, invisible, an absolute presence, a stones fire, then, text and landscape are foliage of the same language.
À l'instant
Director
Winter, fog, outside. The outline of eyes, sometimes we could ride those trails.
Istanbul
Editor
With Istanbul, Martine Rousset puts on the brakes to the world's movement through a cinema of deceleration. At the boundaries between image by image movement and optical fusion, the rhythm of the film gives way to a suspended or floating time. Is it not certain that the idea of duration is more able to render a perception of the city that rather burns for intense emotion. It seems as if the camera cultivates a dreamy half-sleep. To this soft throbbing, blends however, variation of exposure as well. Therefore, at certain times, seeing becomes fragile and dangerous.
Istanbul
Cinematography
With Istanbul, Martine Rousset puts on the brakes to the world's movement through a cinema of deceleration. At the boundaries between image by image movement and optical fusion, the rhythm of the film gives way to a suspended or floating time. Is it not certain that the idea of duration is more able to render a perception of the city that rather burns for intense emotion. It seems as if the camera cultivates a dreamy half-sleep. To this soft throbbing, blends however, variation of exposure as well. Therefore, at certain times, seeing becomes fragile and dangerous.
Istanbul
Sound
With Istanbul, Martine Rousset puts on the brakes to the world's movement through a cinema of deceleration. At the boundaries between image by image movement and optical fusion, the rhythm of the film gives way to a suspended or floating time. Is it not certain that the idea of duration is more able to render a perception of the city that rather burns for intense emotion. It seems as if the camera cultivates a dreamy half-sleep. To this soft throbbing, blends however, variation of exposure as well. Therefore, at certain times, seeing becomes fragile and dangerous.
Istanbul
Director
With Istanbul, Martine Rousset puts on the brakes to the world's movement through a cinema of deceleration. At the boundaries between image by image movement and optical fusion, the rhythm of the film gives way to a suspended or floating time. Is it not certain that the idea of duration is more able to render a perception of the city that rather burns for intense emotion. It seems as if the camera cultivates a dreamy half-sleep. To this soft throbbing, blends however, variation of exposure as well. Therefore, at certain times, seeing becomes fragile and dangerous.
Mer
Director
"The sea is a language whose meaning we have lost" Jorge Luis Borges
Cinexpérimentaux #1: Martine Rousset
Portrait of experimental filmmaker Martine Rousset.
Hôtel Turkoman
Sound
This is what the city offers the passing foreigner: gold and night to the visitor who has barely arrived. Fragments, the stone found by the wayside, raw. We pick it up and keep it. Can we read into the gleaming lights passing by? What is written? Whole images, raw images, far from art and style.
Hôtel Turkoman
Cinematography
This is what the city offers the passing foreigner: gold and night to the visitor who has barely arrived. Fragments, the stone found by the wayside, raw. We pick it up and keep it. Can we read into the gleaming lights passing by? What is written? Whole images, raw images, far from art and style.
Hôtel Turkoman
Director
This is what the city offers the passing foreigner: gold and night to the visitor who has barely arrived. Fragments, the stone found by the wayside, raw. We pick it up and keep it. Can we read into the gleaming lights passing by? What is written? Whole images, raw images, far from art and style.
Passages
Cinematography
Originally a text in fragments, more or less biographical, of different characters. Crossed stories, mixed times, memories and inventions. Coming from the voices encountered. They look like text like sisters. They are the voices of memory, the shadows cast by the characters, the voices of girls, the voices of indecision and evocation. We begin with this work: to read, to record (in analog, it takes breath). Here comes a place, a place found: the foliage of a vine in the South, crossed by the wind Mistral: a landscape. Where are we? Where the boy dies, would we see what he sees? Where was the child playing in the neighborhood? At the heart of the narrative, at the heart of the written word? That would happen. Harvesting images, shifting gears, Multiplying the generations with the listening of the voices, even in memory sometimes.
Passages
Editor
Originally a text in fragments, more or less biographical, of different characters. Crossed stories, mixed times, memories and inventions. Coming from the voices encountered. They look like text like sisters. They are the voices of memory, the shadows cast by the characters, the voices of girls, the voices of indecision and evocation. We begin with this work: to read, to record (in analog, it takes breath). Here comes a place, a place found: the foliage of a vine in the South, crossed by the wind Mistral: a landscape. Where are we? Where the boy dies, would we see what he sees? Where was the child playing in the neighborhood? At the heart of the narrative, at the heart of the written word? That would happen. Harvesting images, shifting gears, Multiplying the generations with the listening of the voices, even in memory sometimes.
Passages
Sound
Originally a text in fragments, more or less biographical, of different characters. Crossed stories, mixed times, memories and inventions. Coming from the voices encountered. They look like text like sisters. They are the voices of memory, the shadows cast by the characters, the voices of girls, the voices of indecision and evocation. We begin with this work: to read, to record (in analog, it takes breath). Here comes a place, a place found: the foliage of a vine in the South, crossed by the wind Mistral: a landscape. Where are we? Where the boy dies, would we see what he sees? Where was the child playing in the neighborhood? At the heart of the narrative, at the heart of the written word? That would happen. Harvesting images, shifting gears, Multiplying the generations with the listening of the voices, even in memory sometimes.
Passages
Director
Originally a text in fragments, more or less biographical, of different characters. Crossed stories, mixed times, memories and inventions. Coming from the voices encountered. They look like text like sisters. They are the voices of memory, the shadows cast by the characters, the voices of girls, the voices of indecision and evocation. We begin with this work: to read, to record (in analog, it takes breath). Here comes a place, a place found: the foliage of a vine in the South, crossed by the wind Mistral: a landscape. Where are we? Where the boy dies, would we see what he sees? Where was the child playing in the neighborhood? At the heart of the narrative, at the heart of the written word? That would happen. Harvesting images, shifting gears, Multiplying the generations with the listening of the voices, even in memory sometimes.
Chants
Editor
To examine the image of this face, this look, there are fragments of raw stories, mineral lights, snatches of an endless dream ... The insistence clashes, until abstraction , To the decomposed time, to its chaos with the gleams of stone. From that face coming back, nothing was said. The look can not be deciphered. The illusion, even to the darkness, remains mute. Signs of an absent song.
Chants
Cinematography
To examine the image of this face, this look, there are fragments of raw stories, mineral lights, snatches of an endless dream ... The insistence clashes, until abstraction , To the decomposed time, to its chaos with the gleams of stone. From that face coming back, nothing was said. The look can not be deciphered. The illusion, even to the darkness, remains mute. Signs of an absent song.
Chants
Director
To examine the image of this face, this look, there are fragments of raw stories, mineral lights, snatches of an endless dream ... The insistence clashes, until abstraction , To the decomposed time, to its chaos with the gleams of stone. From that face coming back, nothing was said. The look can not be deciphered. The illusion, even to the darkness, remains mute. Signs of an absent song.
Un vent leger dans le feuillage
Sound
"With Un vent leger dans le feuillage, a fixed close-up which for three minutes decays a few leaves of their green color, Martine Rousset films the fluorescent vibration of the chlorophyll: the color shapes at the same time as it drips, it institutes the It is the admirable film that Maxim Gorky would have liked to see on July 3, 1896." Nicole Brenez
Un vent leger dans le feuillage
Cinematography
"With Un vent leger dans le feuillage, a fixed close-up which for three minutes decays a few leaves of their green color, Martine Rousset films the fluorescent vibration of the chlorophyll: the color shapes at the same time as it drips, it institutes the It is the admirable film that Maxim Gorky would have liked to see on July 3, 1896." Nicole Brenez
Un vent leger dans le feuillage
Director
"With Un vent leger dans le feuillage, a fixed close-up which for three minutes decays a few leaves of their green color, Martine Rousset films the fluorescent vibration of the chlorophyll: the color shapes at the same time as it drips, it institutes the It is the admirable film that Maxim Gorky would have liked to see on July 3, 1896." Nicole Brenez
New York Long Distance
Sound
A film about my relationship to New York since 1962. It deals with the distance between a memory and the image of this memory, a distance one always tries to abolish. In this personal film we see the images of a city from a close distance, with autobiographic fragments on the soundtrack. The distance of recollection. The trace of this distance shapes the memory as much as the places, haunted by so many stories, so that our marks will blow up in a crash. A crash leading to a collapse in a vortex of affects.
Kleist
Cinematography
Readings. Heinrich von Kleist / Robert Walser. Contiguous. They talk about imagination. Walser imagines Kleist, Kleist nobody, but Penthesilea. In the new desert islands that are the enclaves of flowers of the city. Roses of sidewalks. Wild spaces with anonymity, truncated and without paths, in the banal stones of any career, inscribe and break the voices of an abrupt literary, hermetic and arid fragments in the image of places, almost no of place. Images figures of writing. In the blind corner. Without access. Very few signs.
Kleist
Director
Readings. Heinrich von Kleist / Robert Walser. Contiguous. They talk about imagination. Walser imagines Kleist, Kleist nobody, but Penthesilea. In the new desert islands that are the enclaves of flowers of the city. Roses of sidewalks. Wild spaces with anonymity, truncated and without paths, in the banal stones of any career, inscribe and break the voices of an abrupt literary, hermetic and arid fragments in the image of places, almost no of place. Images figures of writing. In the blind corner. Without access. Very few signs.
Été
Editor
The voices say a story. forget it. Of what time. And who speaks. Both of them. One or the other. later. Others may be. Of chance. Which would cross in this narrative. When. The times have intermingled. The winds meet. History. Pictures. The summer. Humble vacancy with furtive foliage. Fragile memory. Light is a trace of forgetfulness.
Été
Cinematography
The voices say a story. forget it. Of what time. And who speaks. Both of them. One or the other. later. Others may be. Of chance. Which would cross in this narrative. When. The times have intermingled. The winds meet. History. Pictures. The summer. Humble vacancy with furtive foliage. Fragile memory. Light is a trace of forgetfulness.
Été
Director
The voices say a story. forget it. Of what time. And who speaks. Both of them. One or the other. later. Others may be. Of chance. Which would cross in this narrative. When. The times have intermingled. The winds meet. History. Pictures. The summer. Humble vacancy with furtive foliage. Fragile memory. Light is a trace of forgetfulness.
Les heures
Editor
On the one hand: A frame - and then windows in the frame - Spiked - from one to the other - Images designated - fenced, inside / out. Every moment broken - repeated. Always past. One after the other. Cruelty of the open boundary itself - and immediately some untimely object comes up against it - clog the sight - obliterate the frame. On the other hand: The note pursues an eternal moment. It's his game, run the frame, draw the embrasure, and so on. (...) she passes. Immediately in it she plays with nothing. Immediately outside she finds.
Les heures
Cinematography
On the one hand: A frame - and then windows in the frame - Spiked - from one to the other - Images designated - fenced, inside / out. Every moment broken - repeated. Always past. One after the other. Cruelty of the open boundary itself - and immediately some untimely object comes up against it - clog the sight - obliterate the frame. On the other hand: The note pursues an eternal moment. It's his game, run the frame, draw the embrasure, and so on. (...) she passes. Immediately in it she plays with nothing. Immediately outside she finds.
Les heures
Director
On the one hand: A frame - and then windows in the frame - Spiked - from one to the other - Images designated - fenced, inside / out. Every moment broken - repeated. Always past. One after the other. Cruelty of the open boundary itself - and immediately some untimely object comes up against it - clog the sight - obliterate the frame. On the other hand: The note pursues an eternal moment. It's his game, run the frame, draw the embrasure, and so on. (...) she passes. Immediately in it she plays with nothing. Immediately outside she finds.
Mansfield K.
Cinematography
"Readings. A place. Purity of lines. Fine angles. Dominance of whites and blues. Fragility of tapered glasses." A visual evocation of the writing of Katherine Mansfield.
Mansfield K.
Editor
"Readings. A place. Purity of lines. Fine angles. Dominance of whites and blues. Fragility of tapered glasses." A visual evocation of the writing of Katherine Mansfield.
Mansfield K.
Director
"Readings. A place. Purity of lines. Fine angles. Dominance of whites and blues. Fragility of tapered glasses." A visual evocation of the writing of Katherine Mansfield.
Dehors
Cinematography
Landscapes. A utilitarian nature. Contemporary. Cruel images. Changing. Seasons. The watch could be eternal. Each image transparent and non-avenue. Only the sound volumes will unfold an obscure duration.
Dehors
Director
Landscapes. A utilitarian nature. Contemporary. Cruel images. Changing. Seasons. The watch could be eternal. Each image transparent and non-avenue. Only the sound volumes will unfold an obscure duration.
Laure
Cinematography
An unknown writer written under the pseudonym of Laure at the beginning of the century. Readings. Geography. The places of a writing. The forces that create, traverse and lose it. The two image strips will be contiguous on the same screen. Their continuous and simultaneous operation. Two mirrors. The voices and their silences are reflected in it. Fade away.
Laure
Director
An unknown writer written under the pseudonym of Laure at the beginning of the century. Readings. Geography. The places of a writing. The forces that create, traverse and lose it. The two image strips will be contiguous on the same screen. Their continuous and simultaneous operation. Two mirrors. The voices and their silences are reflected in it. Fade away.
Carolyn III
Cinematography
The last part of the Carolyn Carlson cycle. Last look. Oversight. Irreversible erasure. The song is immersed. Blinded.
Carolyn III
Director
The last part of the Carolyn Carlson cycle. Last look. Oversight. Irreversible erasure. The song is immersed. Blinded.
Carolyn II
Cinematography
Portrait. She dances in the center of her area. Obscure to the look. She abandons us to her limit. Turn. Count the chips. Conjugate. Turn on yourself, in a blind echo. Cross the already deserted space.
Carolyn II
Director
Portrait. She dances in the center of her area. Obscure to the look. She abandons us to her limit. Turn. Count the chips. Conjugate. Turn on yourself, in a blind echo. Cross the already deserted space.
Tandis que j’agonise
Free adaptation of Faulkner's novel aroused by the Patrick Henry and Ranucci cases.
In/ex Dérive
Director
Cinématon III
N°22
Reel 3 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series.
Cinématon
N°22
Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.
Cinématon n°22 : Martine Rousset
Sha-Dada
(voice)
Le petite réverbère
Sound
Traces of stories. The images themselves. Tear off. Stain. To paint. Makes light out of them.
Le petite réverbère
Editor
Traces of stories. The images themselves. Tear off. Stain. To paint. Makes light out of them.
Le petite réverbère
Cinematography
Traces of stories. The images themselves. Tear off. Stain. To paint. Makes light out of them.
Le petite réverbère
Director
Traces of stories. The images themselves. Tear off. Stain. To paint. Makes light out of them.
Aurore Collective
Cinematography
Aurore collective is composed of 50 sequences filmed in Dijon and Paris (successive places of residence of the filmmaker), Chalon-sur-Saône, Valence, Cannes, Greece, India, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Carolyn danse
Director
The first part of the Carolyn Carlson cycle. Between her and herself. Three images of the dance are repeated, come up against opacities that do not let themselves be crossed, are lost in transparencies from which there is no reflection. The sound describes their inevitable journey: this motionless movement.
Urgent ou à quoi bon exécuter des projets puisque le projet est en lui-même une jouissance suffisante
Cinematography
Gérard Courant applies the Lettrist editing techniques of Isidore Isou to footage of late 70's pop culture. Courant posits that his cinema offers an aggressive détournement to the French mainstream, reifying a Duchampian view of film: "I believe in impossible movies and works without meaning... I believe in the anti-movie. I believe in the non-movie. I believe in Urgent... My first full length movie that is so anti-everything that I sometimes wonder if it really does exist!"
M M M M M...
One year before starting his famous series "Cinematons", Gerard Courant had made an ancestor to this series: the portrait of Martine Rousset, filmed with a Bolex 16 mm mechanical.
Encéphale
Director
Samarcande
Editor
Filmmaker's visual diary during her visit to Samarcande.
Samarcande
Cinematography
Filmmaker's visual diary during her visit to Samarcande.
Samarcande
Director
Filmmaker's visual diary during her visit to Samarcande.