Olivier Fouchard

Double tribute and double pillage, image & sound Images pilfered from Steven Woloshen Music nicked from Lucio Bukowski

“Sketch XXX (work in progress)” in addition to its “poetic” and “political” content also brings the spectator to his capacity for revolt as an individual before being carried away by an obedient and non-thinking collective membership … The gradual erasure of our antagonistic individual-collective concepts will perhaps help us as individual-collective to imagine that perhaps all the elements of the living being connected this invalidates all “individualist” attempts.

Film-model being edited: work in progress, 26-03-2019.

A reworking of The Posthumous Flatulence of Yevgeny Sokolov, a re-edit and completely new color-grading with elimination of the soundtrack. The film becomes silent, colorful and purely plastic and formal.

Experimental short by Olivier Fouchard

Directed by Olivier Fouchard.

These images are camera essays and exercises that Mahine had shot. This is also the portrait of director Birgit Schiemann whose face was demolished after she had been attacked in Georgia, than reconstituted with the help of plastic surgery. Images date from before the time of the aggression. Since then, we have lost contact... Dusty images have been thrown in a bin and then multiplied and, craftly, tell us about a time of the past, a lost time found again through film. The ghost of Brigit is now fixed in time, but is she still alive?

In FANTÔMES, Olivier FOUCHARD brings a new variation to the genre film, he invents the "cinematheque film".

Solar flares, eclipses, and explosions hand-painted directly onto the negative. The film was slowed down using a Truca and developed at the laboratory of the association MIRE (Nantes) during a residency.

"Yâd: the memory. Childhood memory strucks by the war. The adult finds comfort and support rapt of contemplation over wild landscapes and sings life in a hardly murmured pain..."

This new version of LE GRANIER was made by assembling out-takes from the first version (LE GRANIER, PAYSAGE ETUDE N°1). Certain sequences of both versions were scratched and tinted (ie: the emulsion of the film was scratched and tinted); other sequences were hand processed and developed using a paintbrush under a darkroom red light. Finally, the hand-tinted negative was converted to positive using the Jaffeux technique.

"Days and nights" of work and rest in my flat set up as my workshop. For those who still believe that a free artistic activity (here the cinematograph) is not a kind of "work" (although this word's common meaning is at the very least darkened by suspect political considerations). Although "work" is not a "value" but at most a remainder of Judeo-Christian culpability (Adam and Eve driven out of the Eden and condemned to live of their work), it seems likely that human hyperactivity is effectively at the origin of this famous "reheating" of the planet. Thus, I conclude, so that this "work value" is a pretext for the capitalists to reduce the working classes to slavery and hence carry out their destroying madness. For my part, a moderate (artistic) activity helps me to keep in touch with my fellow humans and to maintain a "social" bond, the rest is only vanity...

"Capitalism is always more profit for the sake of profit, it is not a relevant idea" Nicolas REY "MONEY, VERSION 2" is an inhuman, violent and idiot video-film exactly like "liberalism" (inhuman, violent and idiot). This time, this video-film (without computer) can not merely take on to be only "amusing", "diverting" or even "interesting". The film (MONEY, VERSION 2) is first "unbearable" or even "painful", like its subject: "money", genuine golden calf of a society controlled by perverse and dangerous morons: the "capitalists" or "globalising-liberal-totalitarian» 31/01/07

"Art is like a spray of pollen, like life itself, my sole reward is to be understood by a handful of people" Jean COCTEAU 03/07/1948 in Les Entretiens sur le cinématographe (Interviews on Cinematography), Ed. Belford (Belford Press) Images harvested in Miles MCKANE's garden, with Mahine ROUHI, when we visited Nantes (for a projection of our film "Tahousse") in May 2007. Memories of a few happy and sun-filled moments in this little garden, both wild and well-ordered, where the beauty of the art of life leaves an ephemeral imprint on the fragile ribbon of a small mini-DV camera. An amateur video, a holiday movie; complicity and friendship. This moment of magic concludes with a clumsily framed shot of a large red tree in the Jardin des Plantes in Nantes, shot just before taking the train to Grenoble.

"Aubrac-Rushes is a video of re-filmed images, which we watch as if flicking through a sketchbook of drawings executed in pencil, charcoal, graphite ... These "sketches" were snatched from real life during a stay in Aubrac with Martine ROUSSET and Mahine ROUHI in January 2007. Some fragments of these promenades are also fossilized in silver photographic emulsion ... "Erratic and restless - we stumble into the shots - which search for their lost path - the broken trajectory of a nowhere landscape - the brief and obstinate rhythm of a searching gaze - a real quest: where to go from here? M. Rousset

In Le Granier, the earth is living, is suffering and is full of history. The still camera shows a tired mountain which seems to hide a sacred secret. These telluric landscapes transfigured by Fouchard's manipulations on the image (animation techniques, toning, etc.) of a great plasticity, tell the history of this mountain populated with incantations, and its belonging to this wild nature.

Experimental short

Experimental filmic exercise: analyzes the sun rays with the «eyes shut» vision and with «blinking» eye lids. This «hallucinative mechanic» is also symbolic and intends to celebrate a Revolution, that of the earth around the sun...

The Blue Walk is a silent, experimental narrative fiction film by Olivier Fouchard.

Self-portrait through a tour of the filmmaker's studio.

A grand and mythical landscape tries to get rid of its past. A cleansing, a rebirth on celluloid. - IFFR

July, 14th, 1789, then 1989 and its media coveraged bicentenary. Here a 16mm July 14th in order to wake up the sleepers and to tell them that the revolution is not only a party... This film has to be screened while assistants, projectionists, usherettes, cashiers, festivals directors, audience... throw big and little firecrackers everywhere in the room... regardless of safety rules, security rules... The filmmaker declines to be responsable for any possible accident. Watch out: explosive film.

9,5>16 is with no doubt the achievement of film researches conducted ten years ago on «rayograms» (see Man Ray's «ciné-rayogrammes») and researches on «table printing». 9,5>16 is a pure «rayogram» film, without any figurative pattern, maybe realized in «rayogram» by a experienced cameraman thanks to one or two reels, 9,5mm leader, B&W 16mm printing film (Kodak 7302 or equivalent) and with the sparkle of an empty lighter. "9,5>16" ? "9 1/2" ! It seems to me it is necessary to clarify this to avoid misunderstandings.

The more the film is scratched, the more it exists!

Erotic and « sleepy » dreams...

The pace of the film, step by step, sometimes blind, sometimes radiant, a one-way ticket, long before or after the story itself, brings the image to fruition. Like a mineral, enigmatic, a fragment of an ancient language.

Carrion Remember the object we saw, my soul, This beautiful summer morning so sweet: At the bend of a path an infamous carrion On a bed strewn with pebbles, Legs in the air, like a lustful woman, Scorching and sweating poisons, Opened in a nonchalant and cynical way Her belly full of excitement. The sun shone on this rot, As in order to cooked to perfection, And to give back to great Nature a hundredfold Everything she had joined together ... - And yet you will be like this garbage, To this horrible infection, Star of my eyes, sun of my nature, You, my angel and my passion! Yes ! such you will be, O queen of graces, After the last rites, When you go, under the grass and the lush flowers, Mold among the bones. Amors, oh my beauty! tell the vermin Who will eat you with kisses, That I kept the divine form and essence Of my decomposed loves!

Two bodies, or rather, two women hiding in the darkness. Sometimes they light each other up, sometimes they play hide and seek in the half-light. Both fireflies and butterflies, they start surprising nights choreographies that we only see in fragments. At the end their bodies get closer, in the dark, hesitating, sometimes backwards during a lively and retained dance. Yes, that night she danced, but did they really meet? The real film still has to be done.

Few years ago (1987 - 88), I've been "victim" of chronic hallucinations. In front of the mirror, I was able to see my face distorting itself and transforming in strange creatures which, however, looks like it. Variations Colorées / Spectres (Work in progress) is one more step in my cinematographic works set about the theme of self-portrait. This one, becomes pretext to formal experimentations evolving to abstraction.

"A form emerging from the cinematographic material paces mountain trails. Singular irruption that disappears and blends into nature and its representation. There is no more separation, or so little, between being and the world, yet irreconcilable. The voice is tense, it becomes this arc between nature and the character that seems to bring back to the surface of the screen cinematic flashes forever forgotten. The film of Mahine ROUHI convokes other times which inscribe the transition from one state (psychic, physical) to another. These changes occur at different speeds, on different emulsions according to various treatments. The plasticity that results is not the least quality of this film that revives the mythopoetic cinema. " Yann BEAUVAIS .

A self-portrait which erases itself, leaving place to a dance of luminous rhythms.

The images of this "handcrafted and DIY" film were either recovered or filmed by me. Originally in black and white, they were brutally treated in photographic toning chemistries before being re-filmed with expired film. The soundtrack has undergone the same kind of treatment: the sound is made with old vinyl records, diamond on the edge ...

"The gesture of making a film is as simple as that of appropriating what one has at hand, including the old principle of recovery that is practiced here shamelessly (...)".

Asexual creatures frolic left and right before the eyes of little children? A film that explores, in a light and amusing manner, what Walt Disney movies and, more generally speaking, movies for children, might potentially contain. Also, I wanted to play with colliding recycled super-8 shots with a little song by Colette Renard, found on magnetic tape at a flea market in the nineties... - Olivier Fouchard

I'm watching a film by Mahine and Fouchard. Magnificent! Archaic, mystical, essential. To be programmed some day with Pier Paolo Pasolini's UCCELLACI UCCELLINI. The pace of the film, step by step, sometimes blind, sometimes radiant, a one-way ticket, long before or after the story itself, brings the image to fruition. Like a mineral, enigmatic, a fragment of an ancient language. It's really very very good. (Martine Rousset, 22 January 2005)

Selfportrait. Video without computer. Sound but silent (no speakers). Pain can express itself by a visual shriek, and no words.

A 16mm film printed flat, with the light (the flickers) of an empty lighter, in the darkness of my bathroom. Home-made printing, without a printer (as for Man Ray's rayographs in Retour à la raison) using Éclair 16mm solarised and hand-colored newsreels. Only some fragments remain from the optical soundtrack.

An approach to the different beliefs and representations of God assimilated to light. Light being associated with Spirit in the Coran. The issue of God being represented in human shape is solved by the assimilation of God with the light of the Cosmos.