Eclipses

A paper shutter is grafted on to the camera lens. Iron wires hold it in position a few centimeters from the lens. The shutter or mask is cut to the exact proportions of a 4/3 and just lets you see what is occurring at the edges; it almost totally obstructs the field of vision. The paper functions as a shutter but also as a screen. The surface effect of the shutter is a white halo, similar to a projection without film. It hides as much as it shows: it leads the eye to the margins and shows the off-camera scope.

I also filmed landscapes this time with the pivoting flap moved by the wind. The flickering light activates a form of intermittence. The most interesting moments seemed to me to be those where characters enter the frame. Their discontinuous appearance initiates a potential as much as partial narration. Kept at its premises, the narration is born from an ellipsis effect, in a sequence enunciated by jumps and starts. These starts could occur within each screen and between the screens - if we imagine a series of videos reconstructing the landscape. They would create an allusive effect through loose suturing.

As I’m writing the idea comes to me of chronophotographic intuition: between two image surges, the blink of an eye, the occlusion separating the two stations of the movement punctuate the progression by absence. And what I aspire to by the intermingling of such voids in continuity is to make the video image tremble through a flickering, let's say, 'photogrammic' effect.

Ismaïl Bahri  
Excerpt from Letter to Olivier Marboeuf