Session as part of the Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris.
focus #5 - SURIMPRESSIONS CONSTITUANTES
An evening organised and presented by Charlie Hewison – With Marylène Negro in attendance
In cinema, superimposition might perhaps be seen as the technique best suited to exploring the multiple relationships between individuality and the collective. Images confront one another not only sequentially, but also within the depth of the frame, forcing us to perceive them through one another. They do not truly merge; each persists, whilst all affect and transform one another. A shared field thus emerges, a multi-layered texture. Yet this does not necessarily imply harmonious coexistence. One image may completely cover another, rendering it almost imperceptible; forms may lose their contours, faces their individuality. There is, therefore, a tension in the superimposition, between appearance and disappearance, differentiation and indistinguishability. Perhaps, at the same time, this allows other singularities to emerge: of gestures, silhouettes, durations, intensities… Perhaps we discover that there are singularities which do not precede the relationship in order to survive it intact, but which are instead constituted and reconstituted through it.
Superimposition also opens up the possibility of bringing distant times and places into contact with one another. Gestures separated by decades or kilometres suddenly occupy the same frame. The dead can inhabit the movements of the living, and a present-day struggle can become visible through the traces of those that preceded it. In this sense, films enable the formation of collectives – collectives of people, collectives of gestures, collectives of forms, and so on – which extend even beyond the co-presence of bodies, seeking out or inventing recurrences and/or resonances.
Marylène Negro and Colectivo Los Ingrávidos are perhaps the contemporary experimental filmmakers who, in their works, explore most deeply the aesthetic and political dimensions of superimposition, to the point of making it almost a structuring principle of their respective approaches. For this evening’s programme, we shall see how the Colectivo’s Faces in the Crowd trilogy uses the demonstrations commemorating the Tlatelolco massacre as a setting for an exploration of collective struggle, the increasing intensity of which seems to make superimposition progressively necessary. Negro’s *Révolution française (rappel)*, screened here in its Paris premiere, is a continuation of *X+* (2010), a film which, according to Nicole Brenez, invented a new form of editing, probing both depth and breadth, verticality and horizontality. This time, the filmmaker superimposes scenes from 95 films on the French Revolution, serving as a reminder—if one were needed—of what can be done to combat the fascisms that are still on the rise today.
Taken together, the films in this screening thus explore the power of superimposition to make cinema not only a space where a collective represents itself, but also one where the conditions of its emergence can be experimented with.
