- Other gems
-
Other gems
The Other Gems section brings together restored films and firm favorites presented as world premieres or discovered at other festivals.
Other gems
Other gems
Other gems
Other gems
Other gems
Other gems
Other gems
In just five films, from Metropolitan (1990) to Love & Friendship (2015), Whit Stillman has emerged as the prince of contemporary American comedy. Comedy may be the most difficult genre in cinema, but Stillman excels at it by gambling on elegance over vulgarity, intelligence over stupidity, and love for his characters over mockery. Stillman’s genius lies first and foremost in his dialogues of an unequalled brilliance and intensity; then in his understated and finely crafted direction, entirely focused on the lives of his characters, their quick-wittedness, and the subtlety of their emotions. It also lies, in a time of ballooning budgets and overblown scripts, in his championing of frugality, simplicity, and the pace they set. In Stillman’s films, we almost glimpse Audrey Hepburn, Cary Grant and James Stewart resurrecting the Hollywood golden age, re-enchanting our world with some of their style and impertinence. To take on this cultural heritage (the sophisticated Hollywoodian comedy of the 1930s and 1940s) is not to copy or reproduce, but to find in it highly personal powers of interpretation of a cinematic genre, and to bind together old and new. Stillman’s esthetics, ethics, and politics are uncommon, but shared by FIDMarseille. We are therefore delighted to present the first complete retrospective of Whit Stillman’s work, in the presence of Stillman himself.
To coincide with this retrospective, FIDMarseille is publishing a collective work, the first in French devoted to his work, in co-publication with Les éditions de l’œil. The English version was published by Fireflies Press.
Laure Prouvost is an internationally recognized artist, laureate of the prestigious Turner Prize (2013) and invited to the French pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 2019.
Since the 2000s she has nourished, with relish, her work through her daily life as an artist, a woman, and a mother, which she absorbs, takes in and reproduces in the many forms that her unique imagination takes: installations, sculptures, performances. Prouvost combines them all with audacity, bringing materials and forms to life through the moving image.
With fleeting impressions, notes, witticisms or phantasmagorical stagings, in her short, intense films she embraces cinematic grammar (editing, sound, subtitles, title cards, voice-overs, etc.) in an atypical and often mischievous way. In her way of playing with images, fables, and narratives around femininity, ecology and art history, sweet-smelling flowers become aggressive, or their perfume dizzying (For Four See Beauties), the sweetest of fruits can quickly turn rotten, and the most heady sensuality can oscillate between sweetness and disquiet (Burrow Me; Bruegel Girls).
Laure Prouvost also likes to play with words. After a long period living in London, she has retained from the friction of languages a taste for misunderstandings and shifts in meaning
(Dit Learn; They parlaient idéale, OWT). The boundaries between fact and fiction become blurred, as she turns autofiction into a framework for poetic invention, expressing the instability of the world and opening up mythical, carefully chosen genealogies: a little-known conceptual artist grandfather (Wantee) or many-sided or eccentric grandmothers (Grandma’s Defence Sculpture; A Walking Story). Sometimes, fragments or snippets are taken from ordinary everyday life (drying socks, a toothy smile, words caught in mid-air, devoured fruit…) like many fragments of the world, which sometimes return from one narrative to another, juxtaposed by explosive, alert and intuitive editing that excites and shakes up relations of meaning.
FIDMarseille is delighted to devote, for the first time, a program to her films, a protean facet of her fine art world, which generously and often impertinently encourages us into a delicate, corporeal relation to things and beings, human or otherwise (octopus, fish…).
Each screening is arranged like a possible bouquet, using motifs and colors that run through her work, and offering an in-theatre immersion into her unsettling, jubilant fantasies.
And perhaps you’ll come across one of these five very short films scattered throughout the main program: Stone Breasts(2010), Cat Kidstail Headphones (2010), A look here Cat (2010), A look here Lizzard (2010) and Into All Shovel (2016)!
EXHIBITION
OUI WILL TAKE CARE OF YOU
LAURE PROUVOST
OUI WILL TAKE CARE OF YOU is part of a dialogue with Hear Here Herstories, the first in-cinema program of films by Laure Prouvost, an internationally acclaimed artist whose works are often immersive installations combining sculpture, images, objects and even direct interventions with architecture. Oui Will Take Care Of You, like the in-cinema program, is a proposed montage of her films, but an open one to be experimented with in space, based on her narrations.
The films gathered together present a set of gestures: taking, collecting, sharing, designating, naming, sticking, pissing, looking and being looked at. From one film to the next, Laure Prouvost plays with art history, whether in Looking at you looking at us with Marcel Duchamp’s famous fountain, or in I Need To Take Care Of My Conceptual Grandad with John Latham, in a facetious tribute to his famous subversive gestures when he considered books as raw materials, starting with those temples of knowledge known as encyclopedias. Elsewhere, in the falsely ethereal world of Above the Claouds, the focus is on gestures of care within a multi-faceted female community, or on material life from an unexpected perspective in Stong Story Vegetable. Last but not least, Into all Shovel offers an abrupt dive away from romanticism, evoking the rhetoric of experimental cinema at the heart of a floral world gone wild.
This wandering looks to vary rhythms, between stopping points, hypnotic moments, and other instants that leave room for gentle, floating attention.
SOMA, 55 cours Julien, Marseille 1er
Opening on Wednesday July 5, 6.30pm
Open until July 23 from 2pm to 10pm (extended opening hours from 5 to 9 July).
Since 2020, SOMA, a hybrid art space, hosts artists in residence and organizes exhibitions, conferences and concerts, in dialogue with the resident artists.
This special masterclass will explore Laure Prouvost’s whimsical universe and the various film and video practices that nourish her work. A performative dialogue full of surprises with Mathilde Roman, art critic and author of Nager avec Laure Prouvost (2022) and Martha Kirszenbaum, art critic and curator of the French Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale (2019), editor of the accompanying publication Deep See Blue Surrounding You-Vois ce bleu profond te fondre.
Before his passing, we had begun to work with him on a program of films that would bring together his friends and admirers and pay him the warmest of tributes. From his immense body of work (over 70 films), we have extracted seven gems. From July 4th to 9th, Paul Vecchiali’s cinema and spirit will be alive and vibrant, once more, among us.
VECCHIALI, BODY AND SOUL by Damien Bertand So what might the work of a filmmaker who is a former student of the Ecole Polytechnique, the youngest director of the Nouvelle Vague, a lover of popular French melodramas of the 1930s and a pun enthusiast be like? It is actually filled with emotions, free thought and precise gestures. It provides a stage for characters to perform and succeed one another in a merry-go-round fashion, especially characters who are usually overlooked by cinema, who live and work like everyone else or, conversely, who think and love differently. In these microcosms, people sometimes kill, but they always love. In order to paint his characters and reveal their personalities, Vecchiali has but one dogma: avoid at all costs both academism as an illusion of efficiency, and signature effects as a token of modernity. Vecchiali’s work is not made of two distinct brains (one to channel the most unrestrained feelings, and another for the most clinical analysis), it is rather an energy flux that results from the coupling of these two drives. Each impulse to make a new film strikes him as powerfully as his own affect, but the elements that make it up are like the terms of an equation that is different every time, posed by his filmmaking in such a way as to find the only possible resolution. Hence the salience in his work of an internal emotional rhythm, a surprising multiplicity of speeds, surfaces, materials and dimensions, and a specific way to combine his passion for research with his taste for people. Hence as well, with a subtle, fragile balance, the tendency of his cinema to embrace in a single movement both boldness and control, and to serve the melodrama rather than to use it – which could either be Vecchiali’s greatest humility or his wildest pretension. In his work, film writing is considered less an established skill and more a tool that must constantly diversify its approaches if it is to retain its power of revelation. It needs to become a dialectic in its own right. Regardless of the complete supremacy of singularness, there are many similarities and connections in Vecchiali’s filmography, which attests to its richness. The path of discovery drawn by his work reveals a succession of four times, four successive movements in a concerto whose main motifs are brought to light by this retrospective: the impossible extension of a sequence-shot for the full duration of a film, the naval battle of feelings, and, in the second half of his career, the first person singular, the director who begins to inhabit his films, body and soul, and who imagines himself a husband and a father (which he has never been in real life), as a reminder that, in films as in life, we need to build a family. Vecchiali’s films are so many missives. Why did he film them instead of writing them? “Because the people I love are close to me. Or far. Or dead.” Damien Bertrand
Hommage Paul Vecchiali
Hommage Paul Vecchiali
In partnership with Studio Fotokino
Every year, FIDMarseille invites Fotokino to imagine a programme of recent or older films accessible to the youngest generation, in order to introduce a plurality of cinematographic expressions to them.
For the festival’s 34th edition, children and adults alike will be seduced by the storytelling and virtuoso drawing technique of Florence Miailhe’s La Traversée, as well as by a programme dedicated to the unparalleled acrobat of the cinematograph, Buster Keaton. This nod to Paul Vecchiali, to whom the FID pays tribute this year (who revered Keaton), is coupled with the participation of the musical duo Catherine Vincent, his friends and partners, who will add music and song to a silent short film as our session opener.
Special Screening