A curatorial programme that Archivio Aperto entrusts, each year, to a European festival, artist, or collective dedicated to experimental cinema.
Curated by Cinédoc Paris Films Coop.
The independent cinema movement in France actually emerged from teaching groups or internal working groups at the university, notably with the entry of cinema into the universities after 1968… In this regard, Vincennes was revelatory for numerous students who went there: it was a place where things were brewing, where one could study, watch, show, and make films, and discover independent cinema. Within the first department entirely dedicated to cinema, from the beginning of the 1970 academic year we created a series of workshop-courses devoted to experimental cinema.
– Claudine Eizykman and Guy Fihman, “Images d’un mouvement : Un Mouvement se constitue”, Cinéma experimental – experimentalni film catalog, 2002.
In February 1974, in Paris, filmmakers and teachers Claudine Eizykman and Guy Fihman, together with a group of students from the Experimental Cinema Department at the University of Vincennes, founded the Paris Films Coop: an independent, filmmaker-run structure created to ensure the widest possible circulation of their works—independent, experimental, and avant-garde. Thanks also to its ties with the magazine Melba and the ciné-MBXA, the Coop later evolved into Cinédoc. Over the past fifty years, the association Cinédoc Paris Films Coop has remained dedicated to the preservation, distribution, and promotion of avant-garde and experimental cinema, playing a decisive role in its dissemination and recognition.
On the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary, Cinédoc presents a selection of French films made during the formative years of the Paris Films Coop: innovative and striking works that marked the rebirth of French experimental cinema in the 1970s. This program invites us to rediscover the singular, diverse, and radical aesthetics of a group of filmmakers who worked in close relation with cinematic materiality and perception, entirely free from the narrative-representational-industrial (NRI) constraints theorized by Claudine Eizykman in her seminal 1975 volume La jouissance cinéma.
The nature of cinema reveals itself in the vibrations it radiates when it breaks free from the framework of dominant cinema and the political, social, and moral conventions imposed by the capitalist order. The works gathered in the program Désirs / Déroutes convey, through their fractured and continuous rhythms, the pulsating force of feminist thought and practice in the 1970s and 1980s. They form a flow of perceptions and desires that traverses bodies, gestures, and gazes, finding in the image a privileged site of expression, freedom, and subversion: time itself flows through the eyes and inevitably overflows into a great fête de femmes.
A special thanks to Bárbara Janicas.
