Europe
Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni
1953 – The Outlawed ("The Unmanned" series)
2014
THE UNMANNED - 1953 - THE OUTLAWED (still), 2018
– In which he changes the rules of the game and all imitations are suddenly interrupted –
Third episode of The Unmanned series and replicating the editing structure of “1834 – La Mémoire de Masse”, “The Outlawed” takes place in August 1953 on the island of Corfu, in Greece, at the Club Méditerranée resort where Alan Turing spent his last summer. On a sunny afternoon, the mathematician and inventor of the modern computer, subjected to hormonal treatment after being convicted for his homosexuality, embarks on a makeshift raft to study the morphogenesis of marine organisms. As he explores the coast, the raft progressively drifts away. In the absence of any shore, lost at sea, an ungrounded scene unfolds.
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.