Maurice Lemaître
Films Imaginaires
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Add rightsFormat DVD Interzone
Original format 16mm
Year 1965-1991
Language(s) French
Artist(s) Maurice Lemaître
Subtitles English
Booklet 24 pages (French, English)
Running time 120 min
Films
AU-DELÀ DU DÉCLIC (1965-78) 10'
UN NAVET (1975-77) 31'
FILMS IMAGINAIRES (1985) 30'
FIN DE TOURNAGE (1985-90) 27'
L'AYANT-DROIT (1991) 22'
Description
"A major figure of the Lettrist movement, Maurice Lemaître revolutionized cinema as early as 1951 with Le Film est déjà commencé ? and invented a new form of spectacle: Syncinéma. His numerous film works, from the 1960s to the present day, place him among the most important avant-garde filmmakers of his generation."
— Christian Lebrat
"Lemaître invents interactive cinema, extending it to the extreme by distributing manuals to spectators before entering the theater, inviting them to actively participate in the screening, projecting the film directly onto their bodies. The whole becomes a veritable installation, with multiplied screens, multiple projections, and performance, Lemaître using his own body, his voice, and those of others. Thus, between 1974 and 1985, he conceived a series of Films imaginaires, consisting of intertitles inviting spectators to create their own film from these few lines, but making the film a tribute to the written word, transformed by projection, taking on another dimension."
— Cécile Giraud
"The Films Imaginaires consist solely of texts, filmed as intertitles for the screen, from various works already shown to the public at their time, and which have been printed here and there, then gathered in the expanded edition of my Œuvres de Cinéma. The simple passage into photograms, then into their projection, with sound, transforms these 'films' into another kind of filmic creation, even more advanced."
— Maurice Lemaître