Jean Michel Albert
Mémoire vive - Film - 2010
présenté dans le cadre de l'exposition Panorama 12
Film
In a city plunged in darkness, men are working. They are sanding, welding... But what is this about? In a long backwards tracking shot, the observer gradually discovers the setting in which they are working. Suddenly the decor is upset by explosions. Caught out by these detonations, the light now only fixes this destructive element. The tracking shot continues its path to escape this avalanche of rubble and dust that continues to submerge the frame.
With the men filmed 24 images a second and the explosions filmed 1000 images a second, this film juxtaposes as many temporal apparitions as I want to put into play. In a world caught in the trap of a communication system characterised by the notion of threshold, our body has become restrained to a new form of presence: real time. Its being-there takes the form of permanent decoding, strangled between historicity and in decidability there where the speed of decision however claims to reign. The possibility of exchange is shortened within the time of a minimal transaction and demands that our bodies deal with a true precedence of the instantaneous. Thus in this film the duration is suspended, leaving the spectators the possibility to envisage, think about and question it.
