Country
FranceYear
1974Length
16'36"
Format
16mmSynopsis
Jury Prize at the Knokke-le-Zoute Experimental Film Festival in 1975, Vitesses Women by Claudine Eizykman “gives us a torrential, dazzling film interlacing several sequences at different rhythms, sometimes bordering on perceptive thresholds, enabling that derangement of the senses desired by Rimbaud, paving the way for other modes of perception.”
– Michel Nuridsany, Le Figaro
Biography
A student and collaborator of Jean-François Lyotard at Nanterre in the 1960s, Claudine Eizykman (1945-2018) taught cinema at Vincennes, within the first film studies department in a French university, which she helped found. There, alongside Guy Fihman, she taught courses on cinematic avant-gardes, and led a film experimentation workshop for many years, and she served as a professor at the University of Vincennes Saint-Denis until 2012.
As a filmmaker, she directed around a dozen experimental films and – in collaboration with Guy Fihman – a series of holographic films, along with devices to record and present them.
Co-founder of the Paris Films Coop in 1974 (later Cinédoc) and editor of the journal Melba (1976–79), she was a central figure in experimental cinema in France since the 1970s, both through her distinctive films and through her theoretical contributions, teaching and programming work. Claudine Eizykman wrote extensively on video art, experimental, and avant-garde cinema, notably on the Vasulkas, Peter Kubelka, Jonas Mekas, Andy Warhol, as well as a two books, La Jouissance Cinéma (1976, published by 10/18), and Le Film-après-coup (2019, published by the Presses Universitaires de Vincennes).
