CINÉMATOGRAPHIER
The “Poetry Platform” cycle continues apace, offering meetings between poets (in the widest sense of the word), and creators from a broad spectrum of scientific and artistic disciplines embracing cinema, music journalism, dance, psychoanalysis and more, with the aim of exploring and experiencing the diversity and inventiveness of wordplay.
This “Film” session is scheduled to coincide with the 18th Ricard Prize exhibition, “Paris”, for which curator and artist Isabelle Cornaro has selected several of the most provocative contemporary art videos and films.
This “Film” event creates a discourse between the outstanding and original film-makers Judith Cahen and Noël Herpe. Their film research and pioneering work draws upon, amongst other things, a cinephile culture, exploring and renewing the forms of film narrative, intimate and shared, at once comical and anxious.
BIOGRAPHIES
Judith CAHEN
Judith Cahen is the author of a multiformat film where fiction, documentary and autobiography meet, investigating the connections between cinema, literature, art and contemporary dance. To this end she has created the character of Anne Buridan, a punning reference to Buridan’s hypothetical donkey (l’âne de Buridan) which, equally hungry and thirsty and placed exactly halfway between water and oats, is unable to decide which to choose and dies of starvation.
She has been involved in three feature length films as both director, actor and producer: La croisade d’Anne Buridan, 1995; La révolution sexuelle n’a pas eu lieu, 1998; ADN (About David Nebreda), 2005, as well as a number of short films. She was also the co-author and lead actor of Code 68 (« Anne Buridan aime les défis”) with Jean-Henri Roger, 2004. She has worked as an actor with François Ozon and Jeanne Labrune and as a scriptwriter for Malik Chibane. She performs both solo and in collaboration with choreographers and directors. Productions include: Les répliquants with Béatrice Houplain, Art et politique with Alain Michard, Le Flou de flouz with Sabine Macher. She creates radio workshops for France Culture (À nos corps défendants based on Tiqqun’s Les premiers matériaux pour une théorie de la Jeune-Fille). She has been involved with the choreographic sparring of Emmanuelle Huynh and Akira Kasaï and a member of the W games team run by Joris Lacoste and Jeanne Revel. She has also participated in the pointligneplan collective, as well as in the La lettre du cinéma show. She recently put on a film performance at Villa Kujoyama, Les opérateurs d’échanges, which was presented on different stages. Since 2013, she is working with Masayasu Eguchi. Together they made a movie, some videos and performances and also participate in lthe exhibition Hiroshima Art Document 2015.
Noël HERPE
Noël Herpe is a writer, film historian and director. An avowed cinephile and lover of theatre and literature, his subtle and introspective work combines audacity, fragments and classicism.
A literary critic who went on to become a film critic, he has also been on the editorial team of the magazines « Positif » and « Vertigo ». He has written a number of papers and works on Mauriac,
Montherlant and Julien Green, as well as on the films of René Clair and Max Ophuls and actors Gaby Morlay and Edwige Feuillère. He worked for a period selecting foreign films for the official Cannes Film Festival and is currently a university lecturer at Paris-VIII University. He was the co-curator of the “Sacha Guitry” exhibition at the Cinémathèque française in 2007. As a producer for France Culture, he was responsible for the following programmes: Sacha Guitry comédien, Sacha Guitry.com; Dans la peau d’un collant and Le Celluloïd et le Marbre; the latter, a series of interviews with Éric Rohmer, was published by Éditions Léo Scheer in 2010. He was also editorial advisor for the DVD release of Rohmer’s complete film works through Potemkine film, and along with Antoine de Baecque wrote a biography of the filmmaker, Stock, 2014.
Herpe has also released several acutely insightful volumes of autobiographical writings under the Arbalète/Gallimard collection: Journal en ruines, 2011; Mes scènes primitives, 2013; Objet rejeté par la mer, 2016; and more recently Dissimulons !, Plein Jour, 2016.
Over the last few years, Herpe has been working on a film project: C’est l’homme, 2009 (a medium-length film and companion piece to the story of his filming and broadcasting of C’est l’homme/Journal d’un film interdit, Le Bord de l’Eau, 2013), as well as multiple film objects such as Mentons bleus !, 2014, an adaptation of a one-act play by Georges Courteline; plus a series of short films inspired by the repertoire of Grand-Guignol: Au téléphone, 2015; Le Système du docteur Goudron, 2016.
