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March 24, 2008
Nicolas Provost
Writing about Eat, For This Is My Body called to mind another film I saw at Sundance that I'd been meaning to mention here. Like Quay's picture, Belgian artist Nicolas Provost's Plot Point was programmed in the New Frontiers category, which is reserved for works that occupy the gray area between fine art and cinema and which by and large constituted the most impressive work I saw at the festival. Plot Point was definitely a highlight; about fifteen minutes long, the film is set in Manhattan and is made up of beautifully photographed verite images and (seemingly) stolen moments. Through use of composition, juxtaposition and sound design, Provost orchestrates his found footage into pure narrative. It's pure in that, while nothing ostensibly happens in the film, it's constantly, urgently surging forward, building towards an inevitable climax. It's a breathtaking study on the plastic modes of cinematic storytelling.
Such studies have made up a great portion of Provost's work, which has appropriated both the language of film and prexisting film itself to examine the opposing polarities of the moving picture as art. As he puts it in an interview from Sundance:
“I’m an artist before I’m a filmmaker,” Provost said. “I’m very conscious I’m working with image and sound almost like a painter or a sculptor. Sometimes [my works] are more paintings or fine arts than they are films. Sometimes I make films like Plot Point where I’m questioning the codes of cinema that we are conditioned with. That’s always something that comes back with all the works that I do: to try to move people by playing with the codes."
Just as Provost uses those codes to, essentially, construct classical something out of nothing in Plot Point, he's put the rabbit right back into the hat with some of his earlier works, including Gravity, in which dozens of kisses from across cinematic history are combined into a single fluid embrace, and Papillon D'Amour (viewable below), in which he lifts a scene from Rashamon and, through the use of a simple mirroring effect, divorces it from its original intent. In the case of the latter film, the aesthetic experience trumps any sort of deconstructive commentary one might apply to it. It is, simply, a portrait of a butterfly, and what initially seems like a simple trick, something anyone with a Mac could do in five minutes, quickly blossoms into a stunning bit of impressionism.
Indeed, by the time the film is over, nothing of Kurosawa remains but the understanding that his film was the progenitor of this one; one could find a gateway, there, to a more meta reading of Papillon D'Amour, but it's on an avenue that runs at a parallel distance from the work itself; in other words, the film itself is not meta. It's not about itself, or about Kurosawa. Provost has taken the work of a great director and made of it not a pastiche, but a palimpsest. This eradication is what elevates the resulting film beyond the level of commentary and makes it a great work in its own right.
Thirty seconds shy of the thirty minute mark. I'm slacking off. I need to return to my timeline, lest I answer the urge to expend another few hundred words on the work of Brent Green.
Posted by David Lowery at March 24, 2008 3:04 PM
Comments
I love what he says about being an artist first and playing with and exploring it like a sculpture or a painter who reaches the edge of her canvas.
I love this post, can't wait to check out the film...
Posted by: stacy at March 26, 2008 9:33 AM