For contemplative cinema

What is cinema? This question, posed by André Bazin in the 1950s, is, in my view, a very important one. Cinema, like any other art form, always deserves to have its foundations questioned. At the time, André Bazin defined cinema in terms of several philosophical facets: cinema’s relationship to death, evidence, religion and ethics (“forbidden editing” in his words, for example). There was no cinema-television dialectic, and even less no cinema-video dialectic, as we experience it today, at a time of democratization of audiovisual production and distribution tools.

Cinema is certainly not defined as such because it is first and foremost shown “in cinemas”; this vision is reductive because it is exclusively corporatist. For me, “cinema” is an audiovisual object that is an artistic project, the “proposition of a world” (as Jean-Claude Collot used to say). Cinematographic works can be seen in cinemas, in museums, on the Internet in its various spaces, in a theater, on the street, on a telephone... and they can be made in teams, with various budgets, as well as individually. There is no hierarchy based on technique or budget.

What is “contemplative cinema”, and what does it mean?

First of all, we need to distinguish between narrative and non-narrative films. Non-narrative films are often classified as “experimental cinema”. It’s more complicated than that. Here, I’d like to talk about “contemplative non-narrative cinema” projects, i.e. those that don’t tell a story in the traditional sense of the term. The films made as part of « Jardin céleste » fall into this category.

I fully understood the meaning of non-narrative contemplative films when I collaborated with Art dans la cité (Rachel Even) to create films to be shown on the ceilings of hospital rooms, for the well-being of patients and to help improve their health. With Art dans la cité, I’ve also transformed a hospital waiting room into a cinema, showing contemplative nature films; the impact on patients’ relaxation is significant. These films are objects with an artistic intention, whose role is to provide a sensory experience (with images and sound) for their viewers, and to do so in a pure manner, without the artifice of a story to tell.

Of course, these films don’t have the same kind of distribution space as films that tell stories. They can be compared to animated paintings, in front of which you spend as much time as you like, and to which you can return. For example, many of the audiovisual works shown in museums are contemplative, non-narrative films.

I think these films are a great way to create, because they offer this very pure experience. In a way, they’re films for “unhooking” from the taut narrative thread that structures our lives and our media consumption. The absence of dramaturgy has, I believe, the virtue of soothing. It’s true that in classical storytelling, catharsis is also a way of “emptying one’s emotions” on a story other than one’s own, to make peace. Contemplative non-narrative films are therefore one way of sowing peace within oneself, according to place, time and desire. They have their place in my definition of “cinema”.

The way these films are made echoes what they will propose to their future viewers. They invite us to work differently, to listen to ourselves, the world and others - in short, to develop a new ecology of relationships. In my practice, I often use the sequence shot (advocated in his time by André Bazin), which allows cinema to become a kind of sensitive transmission belt to bring the magic of the world’s natural movement into our busy minds.