4 DVD boxset with the 422 film OUTRE TOMBE by Alexandre H. Mathis
For experienced film buffs: 7 hours with Pamela Stanford
Outre Tombe (2018) is an experimental work, directed by Alexandre Mathis, and staging Pamela Stanford, an actress of intriguing beauty, who once participated in a dozen films by Jess Franco. Over a period of 7 hours, the film follows the wandering of a woman with enigmatic features, wearing wide-brimmed hats, who crosses the sumptuous and at the same time deserted countryside of in the South-West of France. Cinemas or mills eaten with weeds are superimposed on the photographic splendours of their past. Sunny arabesques on a stone wall follow the din of trains devouring the frame at high speed; bewitching moonlights alternating with heady variety music, etc. Here we find Mathis' taste for archeo-futuristic confrontations, free from any untimely nostalgia, but above all he discovers a precious cinematographic talent, that of succeeding in exhaling from an immobile face or from a landscape shaped by shadows, this mixture of morbid attraction and poignant splendor belonging to the aesthetics of the sublime. "and made a curious music there / like running water, or wind / or the rattle of chaff the winnower / loosens in his fan.. " It is certainly fitting to use these lines, taken from Une carrion de Baudelaire, to describe this journey of light and sound in the devastated settings of our time up to this point.
- Ludovic Maubreuil (Article published in Elements October 2018)
"It is one of the constants in the history of cinema that the longest films are often (not always either: nothing is systematic and there are no laws in aesthetic creation, just identifiable paths ) the most beautiful. From the four or five hours of Intolerance (USA 1916) by Griffith to the twelve hours of Nob no joken (La Condition de l'Homme, Jap. 1959-1961) by Kobayashi, we have often had the demonstration Still quite recently, the fantastic novel-novel Outre tomb (Fr. 2018) produced, written and directed by Alexandre H. Mathis lasts seven hours of progressive immersion in which time seems strangely suspended, with a magical staging effect. Distributors and producers find it difficult to accept the idea that cinema is an art of time as much as an art of space: it is even, with theater and opera, the third art combining the two dimensions as closely, not to mention the fact that it is capable of providing a third spatial dimension quite easily since the 1950s. "
-Francis Moury
box set with 4 DVDs in limited edition of 249 copies
with an illustrated booklet of 52 pages