Dominik Lange

"A film completed as part of the hands-on workshop Pages Arrachées proposed by the cinematographic collective L'Etna. A book without a cover. You don't know the title nor the author. Tear out a page. Look at it, read it. Thread up a super-8 cartridge. Film these 3 minutes. Look for shots. Those that are to be found in the text and those that are not there. Those in front of you that bring out the words that still have a hold over you. Text fragment read and treated by Philippe Vernier." —Dominik Lange

"For best viewing, use red cyan anaglyphic 3D glasses, and view from three to four feet from your monitor. You can therefore see the amazing inverted 3D daydream!" —Dominik Lange

"This is Super 8 stereoscopic cinema finally projected in my living room! For best viewing,use red cyan anaglyphic 3D glasses, and view from three to four feet from your monitor. It's finally operational, but after one sleepless night supplements last to finalize the last details adjustments of projection at home… The filtering of images proposed here is red/cyan (red on the left), with horizontal parallax a little corrected at the movie screening, which results in a significant loss of the useful surface area projected into relief on the edges of the pictures, only the center of the screen was thus really projected here in red/cyan anaglyph…" —Dominik Lange

"It's a poetic camera through Super 8 film which plays of the electric guitar in an increased vision of daydream! But in fact this is my very last Super 8 film cartridge (Fuji Velvia 100 daylight) realized this summer, then projected on the wall of my room, and Re-filmed with stolen by means of a smartphone for a division in public on line on vimeo! The cords of the electric guitar which break time with other, or then the guitar's mediators pulverized to replace are to me much less expensive than filming into Super 8 nowadays…" —Dominik Lange

Natural devices are used directly during the shooting process to transform the image with the help of moving mirrors, animated by the surface of water waves and other tremblings on lake surfaces, as well as other bodies of water in the natural space of the Paris urban area.

I wanted to reach the farthest point of my interior landscape, but I have never been able to reach the same place twice! Was it some kind of nightmare, or some unexpected spiritual lightning? Now I feel like a stranger in a foreign world, who would like to find some of this light ...

This is what happen by filming with a great disordered Super 8 camera bought on some flee market or attic sale...

This is the story of a trip through the countryside, cutting through fields, beyond the horizon of the landscape in search of a lost spirituality.

You are, no doubt, already familiar with such literary quotations as "In search of lost time" (A la recherche du temps perdu) or "Those living pillars which gaze at us", as per Napoleon Bonaparte, when faced with the famous pyramids of Egypt?

Les Deux Lucy is a short documentary portrait of the shooting of Raphaël Bassan's film Lucy en miroir. It's the opportunity for us to look at one of our contemporary filmmakers and important film critics of what we call in French cinémas differents, meaning a different way of making films. Our making of offers the opportunity to follow, step by step, the making of this short film with scenes shot on the set, and to listen to comments by the filmmaker about his work.

The fortuitous meeting of two women to the identical first name, Lucy, who formerly loved the same man, Jonathan, induced, in this film, of the polysemous variations on the memory, art, and the difficult relationship between creation and emotional life. Dehumanized by an exclusive artistic practice, the man lost his reference marks little by little. "Lucy en miroir" wants to be, also, a shifted and transverse second reading of "The Contempt" ("Le Mépris") of Godard, by a step more plastic than analytical or conclusive.

The fortuitous meeting of two women to the identical first name, Lucy, who formerly loved the same man, Jonathan, induced, in this film, of the polysemous variations on the memory, art, and the difficult relationship between creation and emotional life. Dehumanized by an exclusive artistic practice, the man lost his reference marks little by little. "Lucy en miroir" wants to be, also, a shifted and transverse second reading of "The Contempt" ("Le Mépris") of Godard, by a step more plastic than analytical or conclusive.

"...Chrysalides use[s] the movie camera as a still camera, flickering between different stills of natural forms, proving once again that movement is not created in the film but in the brain.” (Pip Chodorov, 2002)

Strolling through Paris successively takes us to the Jardin des Plantes where the gardener's mower lets bloom bunches explode; then to the Daumesnil lake in Vincenne's woods which is as always full of strollers and rowers; and finally to the Père Lachaise cemetery where cracks invite beyond improvised ruins and neglected almost-temples as impossible windows and mirrors' backs opened to the unfathomable chasm of parallel worlds...

This film is composed of a series of very short shots. The two principal motifs are human and vegetal, with a few animals briefly glimpsed in passing. The primates of the title (for once, this film has a title, and an insistent one at that) are the men, women and children who visit the museum. A man, a woman, a family with children detach themselves from their surroundings; their images are reworked, re-framed and edited so that they become intermingled with a series of luminous wide shots of vegetation. In this air-conditioned location, the film-maker has managed to give a certain luxuriance to the surrounding nature; the human visitors, in turn, reclaim something of their cosmic dimension from dubious civilization.

A stripped-down visual sonata, in which elements of Lange's habitual cinematic universe (wall, wasteland, city square, cars ...) are captured by a camera more 'documentary' than demiurgic (as opposed to the transformation of energy and vision to be found in his later films).The filmic process used is, however, no less rigorous. Urban prison transportation was filmed from the inside of a moving vehicle and is composed of lateral travelling shots, which move consistently forward, while swinging from left to right with a varying degree of acceleration. There is no double-exposure or editing-in-camera; the background consists of walls, parks, wastegrounds, stations and platforms. These compositions in movement display various degrees of depth of field; speed decreases as we retreat, diffracted by the systematic presence of the grills and bars separating us from more distant motifs.

This film illustrates a recurring theme in the work of Dominik Lange: the opposition of nature and city. The film explores various different aesthetic options. Lange begins by filming a bare tree, magnifying it and giving it the plastic seductivity of a watercolour in movement. The shots of the tree, either gently caressed by the artist's camera or exploding in a multitude of trembling and scratched forms, alternate with a series of shots of depressing new public-housing tower blocks. Lang revitalizes these buildings by clustering them together and/or blurring their contours. At a certain point, a building site appears; we see the buildings under construction, with construction workers busy at their task. Were these shots filmed later, or did the film-maker choose to show them later? It doesn't really matter; the alchemical phenomenon which mutates vegetation (nature) into the depressing uniformity of tower blocks is conveyed with sensitivity.

The artist sets up his camera in front of a run-down shack. He will attempt to penetrate his subject with a series of agile and inquisitive camera movements. Although open to the four winds, the building is presented to us as an impenetrable castle: there are bars on the windows, locks and pulleys: a series of obstacles blocking our access. Lange launches his attack by panning horizontally, then vertically, across the walls; these are scarred with broken windows, which provide the principal motif for the film. This panning movement continues, with a series of variations based on the geometric patterns offered by the half-broken windows: a series of backlit triangles and rectangles, which at times suggest an anthropomorphic motif. The use of different shooting speeds and of in-camera double-exposure causes the film to fluctuate between documentation and abstraction. L'Ailleurs - Somewhere Else - is the interior which the film never penetrates.

A day by day diary of Raphaël Bassan's Lucy en miroir. Dominik Lange followed the shooting of Lucy en miroir for a year. He restructures the material of the film itself and confers to Promenades champêtres an astonishing poetic vision. The shots are often slow and hypnotic. The mystery of this new film does not take its roots in a cinematographic or a literary tradition like in Raphaël Bassan's film, but in life itself. Every day life is magnified by Dominik Lange's camera-eye which restructures the sequences and gives his film a different, yet complementary vision, of Lucy en miroir.

We have fun and we know how to party when we stop working at Collectif Jeune Cinema!

By a bucolic afternoon, quiet and shone upon, we are in a park, for a ballade in the boat and a turn of horse-gear. The nostalgia of a life of idleness is disturbed by the indiscreet and rythmée presence of the camera.

This opus could be interpreted as a long and elegiac version of the Danse des primates au musée d'histoire naturelle.