Yann Beauvais

A Cinetract about a pandemic.

Rioting in different countries is confronted within the discourse of some politicians perpetuating the same old colonialisms and responses to a world they don’t understand any longer.

Film boundaries explore the garden geometry of the royal paths at Versailles, wandering among gilded statues and dry fountains. Nostalgia for bygone splendor is interrupted by a list of rules describing the married life of slaves. By confronting image and text, the film thus takes an abstract view of the disturbing anachronism of the distribution of power.

"Take the path >>>>Still Life>>>> Hezraellah >>>>> of a curfew>>>>> exonerating affection" – Edson Barrus

The winter Place Sqaure. Two cameras spinning, at the sound of musicians from an orchestra tuning their instrument.

The winter Place Sqaure. Two cameras spinning, at the sound of musicians from an orchestra tuning their instrument.

Study of the Mont Sainte Victoire.

Remarks on the recent war in Lebanon.

about a curfew 2006, color, sound, 9'40

“Reading Rimbaud today means to relate his experiences, his desires, to ours – it means that we see a strong connection between his quest and what is today at stake in gay issues. Selecting pieces of poems and letters I have tried to give back a kind of emergency that I sense within his poetry.” –Yann Beauvais

The film is a travelogue of sorts. Ostrovsky’s personal family footage meets the archives of Soviet propaganda footage. The result is a kind of Khruschev-era mix with a collage of Soviet music and a voice-over of my reminiscences of the Cold War era.

“How should we describe a work such as TU, SEMPRE by Yann Beauvais? Visually, it consists of roughly 40 minutes of videotext in movement and arrest, largely white text varying in size on a black background, interspersed with a small number of images; its audio is a dirge of drone music by Thomas Köner punctuated by voice-overs by several individuals, sometimes one at a time, sometimes several at once. Text appears in French, English and Italian and voice-overs are in French and English. It is a work of immense complexity and depth and this is but the beginning of a possible description.” –Keith Sanborn

A trip to Russia by two filmmakers in 1990, forms the bulk of this twin-screen projection, finished some 9 years later; Their super-8 footage mixed in with archival material (and a sprinkling of the classics such as Vertov and Eisenstein).

A trip to Russia by two filmmakers in 1990, forms the bulk of this twin-screen projection, finished some 9 years later; Their super-8 footage mixed in with archival material (and a sprinkling of the classics such as Vertov and Eisenstein).

A trip to Russia by two filmmakers in 1990, forms the bulk of this twin-screen projection, finished some 9 years later; Their super-8 footage mixed in with archival material (and a sprinkling of the classics such as Vertov and Eisenstein).

A trip to Russia by two filmmakers in 1990, forms the bulk of this twin-screen projection, finished some 9 years later; Their super-8 footage mixed in with archival material (and a sprinkling of the classics such as Vertov and Eisenstein).

This film considers the subject of HIV and AIDS from a variety of different viewpoints. On the one hand using textual material in both English and French which appears on screen at different speeds and rhythms, and on the other, articulated by the appearance of human voice on the sound track. It is a story of a person confronted with a civilization which promotes death as a way of life.

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.

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.

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.

A trip to Riga and Moscow in the fall of 90. Confrontation between the reality of the places and a cinematographic memory of some of these same places.

A found footage film about the war. A film which inscribed his refusal of the manipulation of the media coverage of the last holy war of the American and their allies. No image of that war which was also a media propagandist war. An evocation against the stupidity of war in seven parts.

A pile of cuties. Fashion and its code somehow shaken.

This film places side by side the mirrored image of an installation/performance, by the artist Miles McKane. Rather than documenting the piece, the film tries to restitute the spatial dimensions which occurred in the original piece. The participants movements and the panoramic metaphorically reproduce the base element of the installation, namely the white cone.

This film is a series of shot or found sequences (about, of cities that I frequent) which, in the editing, display a fluidity and continuity eluding narration. The sequences are shaped by the editing according to various arrangements which respect the film possible direction: passage from one place to another, from one moment to another. To pass, bridging one point to another, is to transform oneself, become other. The film employs certain leitmotivs which relauch the flow and facilitate diverse transformations of scattered sensations. This film, although renewing lyricism, does not deny formalism which it uses in another manner, while taking into account the meaning/possible meanings produced through linking images and their evocative passage.

VO/ID juxtaposes two separate texts, one in French and the other in English. The texts question art and experimental cinema, the role of the market in shaping aesthetic criteria, and current politics... In each of the texts, words common to the other language appear, creating an indeterminacy of the word to this or that speech. This indeterminacy is increased by the many word games created between the two languages. This results in a double reading: vertical and horizontal, favoured by the word for word. The exposure time of each word depends on the rhythmic of each language, but their appearance in white or black is not subject to it. Faced with these texts, two sounds intervene and otherwise disturb the concentration required by the projected texts. The horizontal reading of both speeches is often in clear contradiction with their meaning. This third visual discourse is playful, brittle, mocking the seriousness of the discourse(s).

Amoroso takes up the question of memory concomitant with the filmed diary. A memory of Rome, a memory of Tivoli but also a memory of Kenneth Anger's Tivoli, this sequence could be a tribute or a snub.

Mainly sketches of different places crossed: the United States, Versailles and Paris. The film ends with a sculpture by Miles McKane.

Reel 33 of Gérard Courant’s on-going Cinematon series.

"...the Arc de Triomphe. Among many variations offered, we have selected about thirty which were cut vertically, horizontally and diagonally. The film, very dense, compact, tries to shape perception by means of specific cinematographic treatments which accumulate contradictory, divergent and paradoxical information." -YB

"It is above all a portrait of Miles McKane. Making a portrait, shooting a portrait are all modes of perpetuating/appropriating a person's image. Could a cinematographic portrait escape this rule?" -YB

In Éliclipse, postcard images of Parisian landmarks are cut into vertical bands; every other stripe of the image is replaced with a corresponding stripe from another postcard image, resulting in the blend of the figuration of the two images

Disjet uses the movement of an anonymous figure in isolated environments to examine metaphysical journeys through the landscapes of the mind.

Either the meter: unit of measure. Either the frame: space time unit within the film strip. Either 24fps: speed unit of the apparatus. Either the screen: canvas without retina, the meter at it’s square. Either the projection: the meter taken to its cube. The sum total of these units produces its meaning. Abstract value or short essay on communication, the meter dictates, tires us by its arrogance, its relentlessness. The tacit agreement is what is at stake in this film whose screening at the limit is superfluous. In this sense it also questions the measure of the maitre.

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.

Extract taken from the longer diary dealing with United States in the summer of '78.

Mis en pièces means in French taking into pieces, but it could mean to set up a play, or to deconstruct a play. The film is about a theater play which is shot against the medium theater. This film is an attempt to destroy the representation of the perspectivist point of view. Disorganizing a process to see…

The is the first filmed diary made by Yann Beauvais.

Trap for the voyeur, his expectations are thwarted each time, disappointed and yet he always hopes...

R is a very simple film, flickering and panning which in its silence induces a fugue of rhythms. The center part of the film is a transcription of one of J.S. Bach ’s Invention.

A three-part film.