First session of the series of events organised by Pascale Cassagnau : artist Jean-Luc Blanc presents "Zardoz"
11H30 am, Star Trek Room, Free Entrance.
"It’s something of an uninterpreted dream that John Boorman captures on film."
John Boorman’s films, taken together, construct a profound labyrinth of multiple trajectories and suggest a continuing journey. Their multiple and segmented narrative lines, their inverted grammatical tenses, map its route as it twists into a vortex. In filming claustrophobic encounters in forests, on islands, or in vast unknown landscapes, John Boorman crafts his cinema like a crime story. Often placed in conditions of survival, Boorman’s characters must finish their journey by looking themselves in the face, because "the hero commits himself to an adventure in fixing a precise goal ; this adventure conceals at its heart a deeper meaning that escapes him ; this meaning is revealed over the course of a final confrontation with himself." The film thus becomes a space for experimentation, through camera movement, use of sound, or temporality ; John Boorman observes and films situations and experiences...from the day after. If a film is a means of transportation as well as communication, (especially if one thinks in terms of Exorcist II:The Heretic) it is also a dream-space, a reality worked over by alternativity. From one dream to another, Boorman’s films create a ceaseless unease. The resemblance to a recurring nightmare partially constituting Boorman’s work is not without its political dimension. As Michel Ciment wrote about "Deliverance" : "The film is a new commentary on America by means of a reflection on cinematographic genres, a reflection that characterizes Boorman’s art. Here is a modern Western in which the filmmaker will turn a certain number of American mythologies inside out." These films express a point of view on reality, as well as putting into question the foundations of American society, or those of Western civilization in general.
"Dans le labyrinthe de John Boorman" is a series of events—film projections organized by Pascale Cassagnau, at the invitation of Isabelle Le Normand, in Mains d’Œuvres’ Star Trek Room—consisting of presentations of John Boorman’s films by artists, each explaining how a certain film crystallizes current artistic research or echoes their own work.