Europe
Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni
1759 – Mil troi cens quarante huyt ("The Unmanned" series)
2017
1759 – Mil trois cens quarante huyt
– In whiche a lemyng starre returneth in the yeer foretolde and alle thing that spak to us turneth ayeyn to silence –
Sixth episode of The Unmanned and sharing the same camera movements as the episode “1997 – The Brute Force”,
“Mil troi cens quarante huyt” refers to the appearance of a comet in 1759 – thus validating the computation and rational prediction of its return by the British astronomer and mathematician Edmond Halley. The action of the film goes back four centuries earlier, in 1348, and unfolds around one unique scene: the escape and the death of a bishop and his court in a forest during the first major outbreak of the Black Plague which was said at the time to be born in the hair of comets.
The collaborative work of Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni is part of a reflection on the history of cinema, science, and technology. For them, cinema is a technological invention which fundamentally transforms our relationship to the world. Giraud and Siboni are fascinated by technological acceleration. So much so that they imagine the possibility of a cinema without a human figure; one which does not subject bodies to the frame, nor bend gestures to duration. Each of their films bring radically different temporalities that are foreign to our present. They choose to film in hidden places, like the particle accelerator under the Louvre museum in La Mesure Louvre (2011), or abandoned places like the Greek temple in Bassae-Bassae (2012) where human absence is hollowly felt. Giraud and Siboni are also inspired by popular culture, micro-histories and major political conspiracies.