Berndt Deprez

The film appears like a ritual with splendids and crypteds psalms. The Great Master of Order (Marcel Mazé, new fetish actor after Aloual) seduces the young male prey with a running cinema projector which carves Murnau's Nosferatu extracts on their bodies. Metamorphosis, rituals passages, Eros and Thanotos, illusion and reality, film into the film are the themes and images in perpetual osmosis in this Stéphane Marti's opus.

Between music and silence, a pale boy handsome as a statue by Canova and a flamboyant black boy in a ritual photographed by Marcel Mazé. With the presence of a Michel Journiac's self-portrait sculpture, votive offerings of sacred skulls and crucifixes, dried flowers, Monique Delvincourt fragmented mirrors, Louboutin heels, images of the assoluta Diva and a sound re-articulation of Gounod's Faust by Berndt Deprez.

With an editing engraved as a jewel, this movie is a real neo-baroque manifest. On the one hand, the Seine's sparkling, the Alexandre III bridge's sculptures and the majestic stairs descents of a mysterious personage ; on the other hand, the brilliance of a mirror reveals a lascivious inner space, invaded by art works, strange objects, tropical plants, heavy clothes, in the middle of which sit enthroned the Aesthete contemplating male nudes photos. The crystalline voice of a counter-tenor celebrating Bach perfects the voluptuous feeling emerging from this movie.

The paths of eight characters brush against one another, collide, avoid one another, attract one another or clash in the texture of a Super 8 ballet film. Climax attemps to transalte the sensation of a nightmare which, by nature evades reality, fiction and even memory to engrave syncopated, brief, distorded, repetitive and obsessive pictures in our brains. These pictures are those of a murder fantasy.

The paths of eight characters brush against one another, collide, avoid one another, attract one another or clash in the texture of a Super 8 ballet film. Climax attemps to transalte the sensation of a nightmare which, by nature evades reality, fiction and even memory to engrave syncopated, brief, distorded, repetitive and obsessive pictures in our brains. These pictures are those of a murder fantasy.

Aloual, the black pearl leads an initiatory journey which is a quest for the part of mystery and the wild side that lays deep inside each of us.

Aloual, the black pearl leads an initiatory journey which is a quest for the part of mystery and the wild side that lays deep inside each of us.

Reel 12 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series.

Metamorphoses, rites of passage, Eros and Thanatos, illusion and reality, and film within a film are the key themes and images in perpetual osmosis within this film.

Carried by chamanics and cosmics vibrations music, this movie present us Aloual, the fetish actor, in a kind of naked and listless semi-captivity. Sustained by bandages, half floating in the airs, arrowed by glances, this St-Sebastian is the heart of a ritual who combine plastic beauty, Chrisitc's dolor and pagan's voluptuous pleasures.

Filmmaker and teacher, Stéphane Marti has been researching experimental cinema as an art form liberated of aesthetic codes and the economics of big budget cinema. His work is primarily focused on the themes of the sacred and the human body. An avid supporter of the Super-8 format, he has been fighting for its merits as a tool. He has used this format film after film and has been sharing his experiences with new filmmakers during his workshops at the Sorbonne’s College of the Arts (Paris I).