Julien Crépieux

Microfilm

Microfilm is a video transcription of a cinematographic work. It isn’t a remake or an adaptation, but a transcription in the musical sense. The structure of the model is respected but the final object differs from the original through the distance taken and its contextualization, a sort of mise en abime of the shooting situation. Samuel Fuller’s film Pick up on South Street (1953) is used like a score for this realization (one could refer to the execution of the work rather like in music). The work groups a number of the artist’s concerns such as the image and its decomposition, as well as the confrontation of different time frames. It consists of filming a film rather like pirates would surreptitiously record premieres or unavailable work in cinemas in order to constitute a collection. Yet in this case, it isn’t a sequence shot and the framing doesn’t exclude the context but, on the contrary, integrates it into a new composition. Microfilm revisits each cut, each movement and each angle of the camera, each value of the shots in the “model” film not by arranging actors but on one or several monitors screening Samuel Fuller’s film, set in space in different interiors and exteriors of an uninhabited house. For each sequence, the placement of the screens in the space is determined by the movements that need to be reproduced so that the reference image is always on the screen. Thus there is a synchronization of movement and duration between the image and the image contained in the image. The artist shot this video alone, with no technical team, so that the quasi intimate link with the model, a very direct bodily rapport, can be sensed on the image. With this display apparatus, Samuel Fuller’s film could equally be the souvenir of a film and could inhabit this depopulated and haunted decor via the off-camera presence of the body filming.