2009 — 11′49″ — DigiBeta
In a return to reflections on Primatice, this film consists of 15 sequences, each of 32 seconds. Created during the filming of Di sotto in su (2004) but left unused, these are subtle images which combine intersecting painted strips of colour, drawings, and the dances of models.
Extract from 15 × 32:
2008 — 13′08″ — HDV
A tribute to the poet Pierre Reverdy, the centrepiece of Sable mouvant is Rouan’s reading of Reverdy’s long and eponymously titled poem. Images of gilded bodies and dreadful skulls and jawbones are interwoven and violently juxtaposed, in accompaniment to the poet’s words. Excerpts from songs of the dead punctuate landscapes which shift and alternate, from Mediterranean light to the gloom of large cemeteries.
Extract from Sable mouvant:
2008 — 15′45″ — HDV
The request came from the ‘Gobelins’ workshop: create a ‘decorative’ video project—contemporary evocations of the decor of the past—to be projected on the ceiling of the ‘Grande Galerie des Gobelins’, to mark its reopening. With the help of Flavio Cury, François Rouan created six projections, in the form of ‘braidings’ (‘nattage’): photographs of the reverse side of the splendid and imposing ‘Tentures du Roy’ are tattooed with superimposed images (the bodies of models). At the heart of the film is the recurrent motif of the hand: interlaced images, reflections of hands, great creatures, ancient drapes, and the living hand-movement of contemporary models, evoking the timeless gestures of the tapestry weavers.
Extract from L’envers des corps, Un tapis en savonnerie:
2007 — 06′21″ — HDCam
A short and elegiac film, Le torrent combines three elements: photographs of the garden at ‘Laversine’ in which the arabesque of a model’s body is inscribed; a fragment of Proust, read by the artist; an audio recording of a stroll alongside a seething torrent, which obliterates the sound of the walkers’ footsteps and their soft conversations.
Extract from Le torrent:
2006 — 46′03″ — DigiBeta
Created for the ‘Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie’ (Karlsruhe), this short film reuses some of the images set aside during the making of ‘Di sotto in su’, placing them in a relation to some of the central themes of Freud’s ‘Mystic Writing Pad’: erasure, disappearance, traces, reminiscences.
Extract from Wunderblock:
2006 — 29′28″ — DigiBeta
Staying with the principle of ‘tressage’, the interlaced drawings blend several themes: two nudes, sculpted by the light, revolve on a platform: their bodies, very real and very alive, appear to intermingle with those, sculpted in dark wood, of two Atlantes. A third thread is presented in the artist’s drawings of borromean rings, inspired by those which Jacques Lacan had once traced in the margins of a text on Rouan’s painting. The soundtrack plays upon these themes, presenting the playful dialogue and questions of the models (‘poseuses’) and the distracted responses of the painter: these exchanges constitute, Sans le savoir, a little lacanian manual.
Extract from Sans le savoir:
2006 — 09′23″ — DigiBeta
This first ‘tressement-vidéo’ (in the strict sense) consists of criss-crossed strips of black and white photographic images, created using a caption stand: these are set against a soundtrack that also interweaves (‘tresses’) heterogenous elements and diverse voices.
Extract from Bandes rugueuses:
2005 — 14′54″ — DigiBeta
The soundtrack consists of a poem by Paul Celan (Kleine Nacht in German, Petite nuit in French), read in German and French translation, along with a dialogue between François Rouan and Anna-Katharina Scheidegger, on the work in progress. The images—traditional analogue photographs modified using a caption stand—are based on bodies, and impressions: they explore the interwoven themes of bones, ashes and skulls. Thanatos, in confrontation with Eros, as always…
Extract from Chiquenaude dans l’abîme:
2005 — 21′29″ — DigiBeta
Completed in 2005, this film revisits an encounter between Pierre Guyotat and François Rouan, first recorded in March 2003. There are no images of the interlocutors: instead, the film is a play of photography and painting (set in motion using a caption-stand) that punctuates their wide-ranging exchanges.
Extract from Pierre à Laversine:
2004 — 21′29″ — DigiBeta
In this film (a companion piece to Di Sotto in su), a model, her body tattooed with outlined sketches, lies down behind a (cut-out) window. In the foreground, the painter/artist contemplates a mirror placed behind the model, seeking to capture the formations produced by the effects of the light on the almost imperceptible movements of her body.
Extract from Le petit objet:
2004 — 41′59″ — DigiBeta
Filmed in June-July 2004, Di sotto in su was conceived and created for the ‘Primatice’ exhibition, held at the Louvre museum. The images of models, seen behind a veil of drawings and citations in the style of Fontainebleau’s grand décor, compose a melancholic poem in four parts: spring (‘ronde au jardin’); summer (the sensual ‘Appartement des Bains’), autumn (‘incendies’), and winter (‘château déserté’).
Extract from Di sotto in su:
2003 — 11′43″ — DigiBeta
François Rouan’s first film allowed the painter to introduce the dimensions of time and movement into his work. The camera in Clamouse sweeps slowly across paintings and photographic work, exploring the feminine ‘cave’ (‘la grotte féminine’), imagining a journey through a sequence of contrasting lands (like the abandoned or excessively adorned chambers of an imaginary cave); at its core are the obscure images, unravelled by the play of the light.
Extract from Clamouse: