Bertrand Bonello, Résonances : Exhibition

Filmmaker and musician Bertrand Bonello reformulates the links between film and music. At the same time as the complete retrospective of his 12 films presented at the Centre Pompidou (Le Pornographe, L’Apollonide, Saint Laurent, etc.), filmmaker and musician Bertrand Bonello is proposing a completely new project on the relationship between sound and image: a remix of his films based on a single soundtrack, creations with their starting point in two unproduced "ghost films", excerpts of sound tracks from cult and classical films played in the dark, and a wealth of original musical compositions for a single film. He talks about his approach. "I'm not used to trying to occupy venues other than cinema auditoriums. When I received an invitation to take over a whole space in the Centre Pompidou with the link between music and film as theme, it seemed natural to try to inhabit it as a film director and musician rather than as a visual artist. And thus to rethink the impact of demonstrating films, together with the relationship between images and sounds. Firstly, a retrospective of my films in the auditorium; secondly, in the space, a project involving "remixes", inversions, voices without images, images without voices and redefinitions of the films, so that each of them takes on a new appearance, and is reborn. The eye describes implacably what is shown to it; the ear will seek out things that are more difficult to pinpoint, buried deep down in our subjectively-experienced emotions. This is why I wanted to disrupt the sounds of these clear images. This idea of retrospective also made me want to show all my films in a different way by rethinking the links between them and stripping them of their soundtracks, to make something new that would reunite them, while making them echo each other – like entering a room of diffraction mirrors. I wanted to make the films come alive in another way – not only the films already made, but also those which could not be made, which will come to life for the first time here through fragmented voices and images, like ghosts haunting the spaces. Apart from my own films, I also wanted to rediscover others in a different way, again with this desire to disrupt the sensorial relationship between image and sound –for example through a programme of films that you would hear in a cinema auditorium without seeing the images. Films that are mostly familiar to everyone, but whose images are now only memories in comparison with the sounds that come back to us. Or the reverse – seeing the images of a silent film react to different accompaniments. What kind of film would we then see each time, while the images remain the same? But apart from all these thoughts on work currently in progress, basically I'm seeking one thing: for a new emotion to arise from these well-known objects, a far cry from any theoretical thought, but as close as possible to an emotional immersion. Like the cinema." Bertrand Bonello