HD video
26 minutes
Part of the Anabases cycle
In the spirit of the Zen riddle about the sound of one hand clapping, a “make” is imagined here as a remake of a film that was never made a first time. The ghost of a movie lurking behind a document attesting to its possibility… Adopting the format of a DVD bonus, this short film is a staged interview with Philippe Azoury, a renowned film critic and Michelangelo Antonioni specialist. The Makes is based on Antonioni’s ideas for films that were never made, published in his book That Bowling Alley on the Tiber. Antonioni’s unrealized cinema finds a new form through an assemblage of various materials that end up giving meaning to each other: found film stills from various unrelated Japanese productions, a precise and surprisingly convincing critical discourse by Azoury, a real life sexual anecdote and an ominous correspondence between Barthes and Antonioni. Exploring the notion of invisible cinema, this montage of unrelated material from the past creates a strangely concrete cinematic experience in the present •
The Makes 2009
Film-stills, pages, plexiglas, steel and fluorescent lighting
Various size
A Morning and an Evening
Out of Desperation
That Bowling Alley on the Tiber
A series of neon-lit panels with film-stills, reminiscent of the vitrines in old movie theaters. Among the black and white pictures there is a short text, a page torn from That Bowling Alley on the Tiber by Michelangelo Antonioni. The texts are what Antonioni called “narrative nuclei”, fragments of stories, notes for films he thought about but never made. They transcribe intentions that were often impossible to film because they test the limits of cinema itself, limits which Antonioni is exorcising through this writing process. Recontextualized within the vitrines, these narrative nuclei come to life with the film-stills that surround them: found photographs from 1960s and 1970s Japanese cinema collected during a residency in Japan. From this assemblage emerges the possibility of a film •
MORE RESSOURCES
- The Makes on MUBI
- Morad Montazami, La scriptologie: science des œuvres à venir, ∆⅄⎈, 2011
- The Makes, Le BAL Books, 2010