Camille Henrot Short Animation

40 years later, the French artist Camille Henrot, in her short films, is doing something quite similar to what Jean-Luc Godard did in his first long features that explored the Hollywood genres. Godard exploited the clichés of the film genre to create highly polemic works, whereas Camille Henrot uses the film genre as her canvas, the material she paints, or rather scratches, on which she produces her own layers of rhythm, stories and interpretations.

Her works presented at the Hara Museum include adventure, sci-fi, horror and pornographic films, with which she made video clips for the band “Octet”, a Paul Lansky-inspired music group. The artist is interested in Hollywood and its perfection of illusionism as well as the reaction of the spectator to this illusionism. Her reflections on cinema and art range from the most basic, physical exploration of the medium, such as negative and positive, light and its absence, and color versus black and white. For example, by exposing color film to light, she obtains a solid black which she scratched on for a project with “Octet”. She further explores the properties of the film medium through playing with the dimensions of scope film, narrowing it down until it disappears in another work.

Of course, one can not forget the issues of storytelling and image in such a story-oriented medium. Henrot superimposes her images over images that where pre-conceived by someone else. She emphasizes that her goal is to put her superimposed images in dialogue with the pre-existing stories and forms rather than just transform them. The series of shorts at the Hara Museum start with work that has been created on blank, dark film and ends with a pornographic image being almost completely masked with black. Through this, Henrot is toying on the idea of striptease and voyeurism, but uses an unerotic, contrasting soundtrack. While the pornographic film she chooses is just a random movie on film, the horror film of her choice is a cult from George Romero, Night of the Living Dead.

Camille Henrot explores the movies of her choice from a variety of perspectives: from rhythmic perspectives to the nature of the film medium, to theoretical issues such as the presentation of women in film. The contrast between her labor intensive animation and the highly organized industrial production of Hollywood is striking, but the artist does not put a value judgment on Hollywood. Her technique is inspired by animation, especially Canadian, but her medium of exploration is industrial film, so far removed from the physical scratching, the “artisanal” animation techniques she uses.

TAB event data: Camille Henrot Short Animations