Category: Films EN

L’envers des corps

2018 — 16′55″ — HD

This film was created to accompany the exhibition “D’un château à l’autre”, held at the Palais de Compiègne from 18 April to 10 September 2018.
The film is a photographic work in which the body of the model is seen superimposed upon the sumptuous décor of the apartments of the Palais. It is also a film created in corridors of the Palais that remain inaccessible to the public.
Beyond the décor, the film is also an invitation to join the artist in his studio. The soundtrack was put together from recordings of working sessions with models, during which François Rouan displayed images of the film, which was at the time a work in progress.

Extract from L’envers des corps:

Il n’y a pas de rapport

2015 — 14′38″ — HD

After a video screening during a conference, someone remarked to François Rouan: “Don’t take us for fools; your models are attractive, but they aren’t models. Models don’t talk.” This staggered François Rouan, for whom sittings with models are moments of genuine and often intimate communication.
That remark, delivered by an academic, provoked the desire to create a film in which the words of models took centre stage. The first edit was completed in 2006, under the title “Sans Le Savoir”. Nine years later, a new edit was created, “Il n’y a pas de rapport”.

Extract from Il n’y a pas de rapport:

Objet Tressage

2016 — 59′00″ — HD

Conceived to go along with the exhibition “François Rouan – Tressages – 1966-2016” at the musée Fabre (2017), this film is based on interviews between the artist, Philip Armstrong* and Mick Finch**.
The images of the interview are combined with archive images, shootings, film photography works, paintings, in order to revisit the five wide themes of the exhibition: Trames (Thread), Paysages (Landscapes), Combinatoires (Combinatorics), Empreintes (Imprints), Retour-avant (Return-before).

(*) Philip Armstrong: Associate Professor, Department of Comparative Studies, The Ohio State University, Columbus, USA
(**) Mick Finch: Artist and Reader in Visual Art Practice, BA Fine Art Course Leader, Central Saint Martins, London, UK

This film was supported by the musée Fabre, Montpellier.

Extract from Objet Tressage:

De la Ressemblance

2015 — 24′52″ — HD

This film was shown at the Villa Medici (Roma) during the retrospective of the Balthus’s work (October 2015-January 2016), at the invitation of Cécile Debray, the exhibition curator.
It is the occasion for François Rouan to revisit his Roman years, and the space that took and still take in his life, the work, the studio (where he was often admitted, rare privilege) and the person of Balthus.
It is also a way to pay tribute to Brigitte Courme, photographer and engraver, who performed at the Balthus’s request many photographies of his sitters, Katia and Michelina. Her photographs were widely used by Balthus, to produce both drawings and paintings.

Extract from De la Ressemblance:

Un printemps à Sienne

2015 — 07′57″ — HD

The short film Un printemps à Sienne was shown during the exhibition: Sienne, aux origines de la Renaissance at the Fine Art Gallery of Rouen. Its main subject is the work of copy François Rouan had been doing for three months in 1973, in Siena (Italy), after the fresco: The Allegory of Good and Bad Government, and the context of this process.
Indeed this work of copy has been done during the years of lead and its terrorism always outdoing.

Extract from Un printemps à Sienne:

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Trotteuses

2014 — 39′59″ — HD

François Rouan wrote Trotteuses in homage to Jean-Claude Deshons, a lost friend. It is a text for three characters, Una, Due and Tre. Autobiographical preoccupations are at the heart of these monologues, addressing the themes of death, love, and the political. The artist constructs a temporal framework composed of ‘tentures’ (tapestries) each lasting one minute. The tapestries were created using a superimposed series of photographic film images and films, and composed of images which are cut-out, reconstructed and interwoven.

Extract from Trotteuses:

D’ici et de dessous

2013 — 25′10″ — HD

This film, created for the exhibition François Rouan à Hautefort is a fiction constructed through a combination of photographic works and mixed voices. In his distinctive manner, the artist evokes the complex history of the transformation of the fortress of the baron and troubadour Bertran de Born into the palace of the marquis Jacques-François de Hautefort. This is a history that includes Nicolas Rambourg, an architect who worked on the original castle design, and Francesco, a (fictional) painter of today, and yesterday.

Extract from D’ici et de dessous:

Bernard Noël à Laversine

2010-2012 — 18′53″ — HD

This three-part film revisits the artist’s work with the poet Bernard Noël, which was the subject of two books, Ce jardin d’encre / Este jardin de tinta and Le chemin d’encre / طريقُ المدَاد. Photographic works exploring the theme of the feminine accompany the poet’s voice and his face, calling for a politics of the body. This project has its source in the friendship which bonds the artist and the poet. At the heart of the film is a text, written and read by François Rouan, a tribute to the poet and the landscape in which he lived. The poet’s voice is intermingled with those of young actresses: these partitions serve to underline the interweaving of languages, both books having been translated (one into Spanish, the other into Arabic).

Extract from Bernard Noël à Laversine:

Des bijoux discrets

2012 — 4′43″ — HD

This film presents pieces of jewellery created by the artist using gold thread.

Extract from Des bijoux discrets:

Odalisque Flandres

2011 — 19′53″ — HD

This video, created to accompany the exhibition held at the ‘Musée Matisse’ (Cateau Cambrésis) entitled La découpe comme modèle, revisits the themes of Kuwabata’s ‘Sleeping Beauties’, of Godard and the dialogue in his film Le Mépris (Contempt), Collioure and the North and, of course, Matisse’s Odalisques.

Extract from Odalisque Flandres:

15 × 32

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.

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Sable mouvant

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:

L’envers des corps
Un tapis en savonnerie

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:

Le torrent

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.

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Wunderblock

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.

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Sans le savoir

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:

Bandes rugueuses

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:

Chiquenaude dans l’abîme

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:

Pierre à Laversine

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:

Le petit objet

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.

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