Robert Cahen

About “Four Doors” André Bon writes : these doors open onto four soundscapes which express in the order : tension, relaxation, expectation, ecstasy. We say : Sign. Symphonic breathing in four movements where music and sensuality of the images are offered in counterpoint, by subtle shifts. Small story of an encounter to decipher.

Twins still in their amniotic fluid announce our human condition, our compulsion to walk, move forward, run. When everything moves, we go through the forest of emotions in a dreamlike way. But it is thanks to water and its light reflections, to its transforming power that the infinite “Kosmos” plays with our uncertainty.

Twins still in their amniotic fluid announce our human condition, our compulsion to walk, move forward, run. When everything moves, we go through the forest of emotions in a dreamlike way. But it is thanks to water and its light reflections, to its transforming power that the infinite “Kosmos” plays with our uncertainty.

A film by Robert Cahen about funereal observances and the songs of those left behind.

A film by Robert Cahen

A film by Robert Cahen and John Borst. A woman passes through Hong Kong after dark.

Small piece of life in the streets of Ho Chi Minh.

A film by Robert Cahen

A film by Robert Cahen

Hanoi 2003. A woman does her hair at night. A train passes between the houses. A crowd rushes by jostling, working. A forgotten child waits.

A film by Robert Cahen

The light creates the motion. The film uses black and white as a way to to reveal things. Something is happening here linking death, love and pleasure. Appearance, disappearance, the rhythm of breathing revealing the passing of time both binds and releases our feelings.

Music by Bernard Premegiani.

A Japan where time stands still; men and women bound to their land and their work; bodies floating in thermal springs... shown through the eyes of a painter (inspired by the characters in Sôseki's novel "Pillow of Herbs") where these references give a free interpretation to the images, so that we make the journey in search of temporary solace. The traveller has understood that "everywhere it is difficult to live" (Sôseki) and tries to make a picture from real things so that, through the act of painting, he no longer suffers.

From "That was" to "Did we go there?"... The Antarctic approached, observed, scrutinised, analysed, displaced. Questions about reading the landscape, reading motion: a slow motion journey through memory, as if "to have the time at last to know".

Once a year, the city of Pisa is lit up by thousands of candles for an age-old religious festival. Magic, visions, dreams and light...

"It's in the idea of movement where, for me, something essential comes together/combines - seven shorts poems write to each other in images, fleeting visions of China glimpsed through sights, through sounds, always moving." Robert Cahen

A film by Robert Cahen

Produced for a British television series on Channel 4, this short film shows once more Robert Cahen’s style: notions of passage, appearance, disappearance, of time passing and human beings revealing their individual identities.

"Chili-Impressions" is the diary of a journey made by Robert Cahen during his stay in Chile in 1987. Like flicking through the pages in a notepad, the images constantly superimpose themselves and always seem to spring from a place beyond memory: the wind, the river, the rails, which carry them to the source of the impression. The journey never stops, it returns more distant still, until the jogging of memory caused by the simple power of these fleeting scenes suddenly gives a sense of place, of place in this world.

A contemporary dance video and a tribute to Patrick Bokanowski. The choreography of Bernardo Montet, conceived and created to be filmed by Robert Cahen, is based on the music of Michèle Bokanowski. It speaks of the loneliness of the dancer in the centre of the stage.

Temporary landscape; visual and sonic messages; blended; the city. Part of the "New Spaces" project, the film is an exploration of the landscapes and sounds of Hong Kong, seeking its identity between the old China and the new.

A film by Robert Cahen

J.M. Tringaud photographed the sea. On the day of the summer solstice 1990, 12 bottles, each containing an original photo are cast into 12 seas and oceans around the globe. In a kind of melancholy chant, Robert Cahen takes us across the solitude of these giant oceans where occasionally a lighthouse provides a human dimension.

A film by Robert Cahen

A fictional video excursion: on a beautiful summer day, peaceable tourists take the Montenvers cog railway right up to the Mer de glace. Full of humour and affection, it pays homage to the films of Jacques Tati.

A film by Robert Cahen

The still photograph is transformed and reframed in time in these exquisite collections of thirty-second "video postcards." An image of a city appears to be captured as a traditional postcard, frozen in time. Suddenly the photograph is "released," electronically brought to life for one heightened, anecdotal moment — a single gesture, a punctuating sound — and then frozen again. Witty and often poignant, these revelatory documents of time, place and memory denote a fleeting, ephemeral reality. A 32-minute version also exists, featuring additional postcards.

A pivotal work for video art of the 1980s. Fragments of time during a journey where the changing landscapes become full players in a story shown in shadowy backplay, which relates the imagined encounter of two passengers.

A film by Robert Cahen

The concept of "things half seen" determined the meaning of this film. Hidden scenes, barely revealed, follow one another as living and significant views affecting our wish to see and understand what we see only as glimpses, but might see in its totality. Made as a video-short principally through a succession of quick sequences, "Glimpses" shows the maintenance of mystery between two "masked" people in a world where the curtains remain closed.

A film by Robert Cahen.

In Fellini's film "Amarcord", an ocean liner emerges from the night and the mists of the water, appears like a mysterious monster, passes like a dream. This video takes up the idea of ​​an unreal "passage" and plays the effect of spectacular surprise that it reveals.

Shot in locations which include Robert Cahen's childhood home, Mulhouse station, and the Court where his father was an advocate, this short is a journey into the unconscious, without words - both strange and frightening.

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.

A film by Robert Cahen

Short film.

A portrait of Karine from birth to six years in black-and-white film and photographs.

It was in 1973 that this film, the first film shot in Super 8 mm with magnetic sound, was broadcast on television. The Carnival of Basel is famous for the music of its fife-and-drum military bands. The imaginary quality of the carnival comes face to face with musique concrète.

"L'invitation au voyage” is articulated around the combining of images of memories. On a technical level, this is obtained by using fading photographs followed by solarised landscapes produced using the universal special effects device developed by the research department of the ORTF (the French national radio and TV broadcasting corporation) and a scene filmed in slow motion using a high-speed camera operating at 200 frames per second.

"L'invitation au voyage” is articulated around the combining of images of memories. On a technical level, this is obtained by using fading photographs followed by solarised landscapes produced using the universal special effects device developed by the research department of the ORTF (the French national radio and TV broadcasting corporation) and a scene filmed in slow motion using a high-speed camera operating at 200 frames per second.

Experimental film

L'Eclipse, is composed as a visual little poem using light, colour, rhythm, to present a universe that is half celestial, half cerebral, in which graphic grids play with disappearing and setting suns. Robert Cahen creates effects of fire, clouds, steam, that contrast with the regular and geometric structure of the image.