Xavier Baert

Une fiction queer en clin d'oeil aux films d'horreur Universal des années 30 et l'expressionnisme allemand, un rite de sacrifice sexe et rock.

Créé dans la seconde moitié des années 90, l'association de cinéma expérimental l'Etna connaîtra la transition du cinéma argentique au numérique. Son local, en plein Paris, ne résistera pas à la gentrification.

Found footage movie from Wong Kar-wai's In the mood for love trailer.

Xavier Baert works on the visual outline of the body. He creates cinematographic body states which according to the French filmmaker, only cinema can invent. Ghost plays on projection and light phenomenon, on the double exposure of a body on another. The narration which is essential through a slow temporal flood comes within a progression which plays on the working drawing and fading. A ‘ghostly’ fading as it is more a question of the appearance of a body without substance through shadow effects and light loops. The image cast in negative adds to this ethereal space the sensation of unreal space, which however, forms one body with the presence of this shadow in perpetual movement. Fantome reminds us that cinema’s main rights are ‘recording bodies.

Othello Vilgard, Xavier Baert and Lionel Soukaz filmed a performance by Tom from Beijing: one strips himself naked while the others veil and reveal the film.

Othello Vilgard, Xavier Baert and Lionel Soukaz filmed a performance by Tom from Beijing: one strips himself naked while the others veil and reveal the film.

This birth of the human silhouette metonymically takes us back to the origins of cinema, to Marey or Muybridge’s pre-cinema. Baért with his model wanted to re-find the dancer Loie Fuller’s aerial movements such as one can see in Fire Dance (1901). This research for origins continues with the malleability of the ‘imprints’ of the dancer and the circulation of materials and lights.(…) Imprint plays, from the point of view of form, with the material, the identity, the hybridization between film and skin, material and light (…), towards the constitution of a new organism where skin and celluloid acquire an even esthetical status, a true melting pot of malleable images and thoughts.

Footage of dancer Julien Touati in dramatic lighting.

Footage of dancer Julien Touati in dramatic lighting.

Two men making love. The question of the embrace (which encompasses the caress, the look, the kiss, the penetration, the speed of movement, the expression of ecstasy…) give to the film a scenario of examples of editing (disconnection, links, rhythm, interlaced films, alternate editing…). A sometimes figurative logic (make love, to be loving, to enjoy), choreographic (to caress, to interlace, to kiss, to lick, to penetrate), and cinematographic ( to link, to bring together, to move, to embrace…:to mount)

Two men making love. The question of the embrace (which encompasses the caress, the look, the kiss, the penetration, the speed of movement, the expression of ecstasy…) give to the film a scenario of examples of editing (disconnection, links, rhythm, interlaced films, alternate editing…). A sometimes figurative logic (make love, to be loving, to enjoy), choreographic (to caress, to interlace, to kiss, to lick, to penetrate), and cinematographic ( to link, to bring together, to move, to embrace…:to mount)