December by Claude Ciccolella

21'16   stereo   2018

About
"Degaby" and "Doume", my memory islands were filmed in five days, on Christmas Eve 2017, in a fixed long shot or in a motion long shot. I took the bus 83 towards Endoume with in the head the film Kaïros by Stefano Canapa & Elisa Ribes, a dance film-poem selected and broadcast six months earlier in the 2017 edition of Images Contre Nature, evoking the disappearance of the sirens and the journey of migrants in the Mediterranean, and the Diwan film by Werber Nekes reviewed at Videodrome 2, the month before. During a walk between two courses at the marine station of Endoume during my masters of oceanology, I had spotted an esplanade overlooking these islands. I took little time to find it and once there I let my eyes navigate and soak up this beautiful place. Surrounded by this unreachable dimension that escapes in infinity, the islands seemed to merge into a single rock, peripheral to the city of Marseilles, a liberated rock, primitive and wild, which seemed to open the communication with the psychic world. When I was sure of the location of the objective, I scotched blue the only place that would serve me observation. Moments later, I began to film, the camcorder on his flexible tripod firmly gripped on the iron railing. The two islands that seemed to form only one began to come alive, punctuated by my imagination, and then broke away from my control to live their lives. During the five mornings I watched them and recorded them on their camera feet, in different postures, inclinations, speeds and focal lengths until the progressive disappearance of the motif whether in full light or in absence of light by opening or closing the diaphragm. I have worked the space of the image in an experimental cinematic experience and the presence of the moment. The day after the shooting, my wife and I took the train, destination Gap, to celebrate Christmas at my in-laws home. And it is in this train that the editing took shape. I used a slow-motion form of structural cinema, in a fixed shot and blinking. In the horizontal editing, the image jumped and rebounded in a figure in tension, in the vertical editing, the spaces were superimposed, the island was shirking and sliding towards an out of frame and then was suspended in the tunes. Came the idea of a cinematographic film, every day a different experience of the island, and of its future in free perception. The sensation of kinetic energy, the passage from fixed image to zoomed or shifted image, the acceleration of the movement, the colorimetric transformations in complementary color suggested to me an entropic sensation. After each modification of the insular image, the pattern will return to a state apparently close to its initial state ... like a stretched elastic then released or a material sucked up by the depths that would re-emerge in the air and freeze. The impossible return to this initial state generates uncertainty, instability and unpredictability. The repetition of the process mobilizes the directional gaze and causes a psycho-physiological effect in the viewer. Then the pattern becomes a trace and runs towards its loss then disappears into nothingness. That's how germated the entropic sensation and the imbalance of nature, represented by a mixture of real images and illusory, unstable, fleeting volatile images, by the actions of time and their transformation in space, unpredictability of accidents, by the non-linear action of time and the fragility of nature when it is object of manipulation.


The cinematographic journal in five days
At the edge of the field and out of the field and in a silent song.

Tuesday
Endoume breaks up.

Saturday
In the morning light emerges an archipelago.

Friday
The rock disappears.

Wednesday
The crested Mediterranean Cormorant takes flight the Mediterranean puffin smooth its feathers.

Thursday
Runaway.

diffusion

Decmber 2018
Festival Tous Courts, ESAAix / France (installation)

October 2018
International Short Film Festival Pune / Inde

August 2018
Award Honorable Mention Experimental Forum / Los Angeles / USA

July 2018
CIMIFF / Mexique

May 2018
FICCSUR / Chili

March 2018
FICOCC #13 / Venezuela
Festival Mundial de Cine Independante de Quito / Equateur
12 Months Film Festival / Roumanie

@ 2024 by Claude Ciccolella