This cycle invites you to discover another history of experimental cinema under the sign of dance, through a series of unavoidable and unclassifiable films which, recalling the mysterious formula of the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, are capable of making you realise that “seeing is a dance”. From the first phenakistoscope showing the successive stages of a dancer’s pirouette, to the chronophotographic decompositions of the famous Pas de deux filmed by Norman McLaren; from the first captures of serpentine dances painted by hand on film, to the miraculous adaptations of post-modern choreographies through multiple exposures and other kaleidoscopic effects conceived by Ed Emshwiller; from Maya Deren’s “choreography for the camera” studies, to Marie Menken’s “somatic camera” improvisations; from Len Lye’s tribal scribble trances recorded on film, to the random configurations of moving luminous forms generated by AI. .. A “dancing impulse” deeply anchored in the conception and perception of the movement of images accompanies the evolution of experimental cinematographic forms over the decades. This dancing impulse, which is not reduced to body postures and academic dance steps, emanates from the creative gestures of various filmmakers and has repercussions in the sensitive experiences that the films themselves propose to viewers, impelling them to dance with their gaze in front of the camera.
In three themed sessions – “Pioneers of cine-dance”, “Black & light dances” and “Bodies and graphics / graphic choreas” – and a session in honour of Ed Emshwiller – an experimental filmmaker and video art pioneer who collaborated with American choreographers Alwin Nikolais and Carolyn Carlson in the 1960s and 1970s, this cycle highlights and confronts several emblematic cine-dances from the history of the genre, with some of the works by “free radicals” that challenge and push the boundaries of the discipline, or even with more recent creations that revisit this cine-choreographic legacy in the light of digital cinema technologies. Stolen from the major film “scratched” on film by the precursor of direct animation Len Lye – who in turn was inspired by the chemical phenomenon of the same name – the expression “free radicals” that gives this programme its title evokes the primitive and impulsive, excessive and even transgressive dimension of dance movement before its codification through academic choreographic figures: in other words, these are works that seek less to sublimate or crystallise choreographic art, than to reconnect with the primordial experience of dance in its state of coreia (from the Greek khoreía) still without spelling (graphê). Conceived as an extension of the filmmakers’ somatic experiences, which are seen as transmissible to viewers through a kind of “kinaesthetic empathy”, the films chosen thus allow us to see how sharing a vocation or a dancing impulse can elucidate the most radical dimensions of the movements of the images, which experimental cinema invites us to experience through our own bodies and gazes.
