10.04.10 – 11.04.19 The anti-universe of the cinema with Paul-Emmanuel Odin

THE ANTI-UNIVERSE OF CINEMA

public: from 8 years to 100 years
number of participants: 10

« And the cinematograph, all of a sudden, describes with a clear accuracy a world that goes from its end to its beginning, an anti-universe that, until then, man could hardly imagine. (…) With the first possibility of seeing the world live faster or more slowly, the cinematograph brings the first vision of a universe that can move backwards. Strange spectacle of which the man hitherto had had no idea, no suspicion, except as a phantasmagoria scarcely imaginable. » Jean Epstein

The invention of the cinema was not that of the reproduction of time, but its inversion: from the first screenings of the Lumière cinematograph in 1895, we projected Demolition of a wall at the place and upside down, and the Baths of Diana in Milan, discovering the unheard of spectacle of a cloud of dust and fragments that reconstitute and right before our eyes a wall. Or, the divers would come out of the water and fly to land on the stepping stones. An extraordinary revolution that immediately fascinates and scares.

In film reversal, time and history are out of date. An « anti-universe » shows itself with the astonishing charge of its obviousness, to which an « antilogic » and an « antiphilosophy » correspond. Cinema proves to be more than an art, it is a new way of thinking, it is a philosophy that goes beyond philosophy, integrating the sensitive, the feeling, the irrational, the absurd.

The workshop proposes to watch films that are part of the history of the cinema to create from extracts (from historical films, or from recordings made with the participants) a performative film *, that is to say a poetic lecture that tells the antihistory of the back of time, cinema.

*Éric Bullot (dir.), From the performative film, it: éditions, 2018