On November 29th will be released on Conann of the Bertrand Mandico (read our critical), a dense work, a quaint visual universe, which is offered here to accompany a selection of short films by the same director. Between sexual exuberances, reworked biopics and tricky staging, welcome to the crazy world of the most barred French director of the moment...
Contents
We barbarians
Source : Luxembourg, France, Belgium | Release date : 2023 | Where to see the movie? Distributed with Conann | Duration 27 minutes.
Work very close to his parent Conann and his brother of duration Rainer, a Vicious Dog in a Skull Valley, it was presented in the "Virtual Territories" selection of the GIFF (Geneva International Film Festival). Indeed, We barbarians It is part of a thematic line (the story of this Conann and the warriors who are alongside it) and visual, but with its diffusion. We barbarians was actually offered via virtual reality helmets where the viewer, sitting in the centre, simultaneously discovered 4 parts of the short film by turning 360° in space.
Thus, to him to make his own montage of this work by choosing which screen to look at (the dispensed sound corresponds to the screen that is fixed, while hearing the whispers of the other screens in our back). An extra stone in the cannon of Conann, falling as evidence of a desire to explore novelties of the film medium...
Rainer, a Vicious Dog in a Skull Valley
Source France | Release date : 2023 | Where to see the movie? Distributed with Conann | Duration 26 minutes.
Second and last work in connection with Conann, this short presented to the GIFF directly after the feature film allows a deepening of the Universe built in the form of a loop where, character after character, one digs in mythology and in the Universe Conann.
Funny, barred, erotic and macabre, we find all the ingredients along but focusing more on Rainer's speech and point of view (the great Elina Löwensohn, which will also be found in the medium in the next Betrand Bonello, The Beast, and in all the shorts of this selection). A perfect post-session feature of Mandico so (or test session to enter or not into the Universe of the director before Conann, as indicated Killerse7ven in the selection of courts for Halloween !).
Boro in the box
Source France | Release date : 2011 | Where to see the movie? MUBI | Duration 40 minutes.
Filmed biography of Polish director and visual artist Walerian Borowczyk, Boro in the Box takes the form of an alphabet (form used by Borowczyk himself in his career) where each letter narrates, chronologically, an important step in the tumultuous life of the filmmaker...
If the biopic in black and white taking surrealisms sometimes recalls the Elephant Man Lynch, Boro in the Box Maybe the most sober court of selection. However, Mandico does not forbid real vertigo of staging, the splendor of an achrome photograph and an euphemical and naive narrative that sublimates this short film. And besides, one easily understands all the love that Mandico has for his character (whose voice is interpreted by Elina Löwensohn who also plays the mother), as he multiplies references to Borowczyk in his own works (including in the shorts of this list!). Thus, Boro in the Box is an invitation to discover the crazy cinema of Polish (between nymphomaniac bears of The Beast, the lubricated Luchini Immoral tales or artistic explorations of theSnail of Venus, there is something to do... in addition to being a visually and narratively exciting work. And if the documentary is not enough, know that Mandico also participated in the book WALERIAN BOROWCZYK for Les Éditions de l'oeil, exploring the artist's artistic, graphic and cinematic work.
Is there a virgin still alive?
Source France | Release date : 2015 | Where to see the movie? MUBI | Duration : 8 min 47
As with Rainer, A Vicious Dog in a Skull Valley we were talking about this short film in Halloween's selection. A work that follows in line with what Mandico proposes in his films: poetry, many, gore, nudity, all in an eminently experimental carcan. Here, Is there a virgin still alive? offers a rereading in pseudo-biopic masturbated with fantastic life of a Joan d'Arc who would have escaped the stake. A semi-virgin then has the misfortune of falling on this tyrannical Jeanne who leads him into his wake.
Living Still Life
Source : France, Belgium | Release date : 2012 | Where to see the movie? MUBI | Duration 15 minutes. 41
If we don't change the right things (we always have a main role in Mandico's muse, Elina Löwensohn), the image is clearer here, less congested, less parasitic. For Living Still Life (subtitled The Resurrection of Still Lifes), we are dealing with a visibly tortured artist who, falling on the corpse of a hare, takes at the foot of the letter the quote of Walt Disney opening the short film: "The animation is the illusion of life". She will then take the Lepus Bloody in her studio, where she will try to breathe a new life into her life while she stops.
Net image, therefore, large format, sober music and glauque theme, the macabre recipe of Living Still Life the closeness of the work of explorer of indecency led by Lars von Trier. Absolutely amazing in its gradation and in the strange schism that forms between life (the artist, stop-motion, colors) and death (the landscapes incubated by winter, the corpses, the bowels), Living Still Life is a shock of images in just 15 minutes. A work of flux and reflux, to be affixed to the eye of the eyeA Charogne of Baudelaire, where constantly the most beautiful is near rot and death. Amazing!
Ultra Pulp
Source France | Release date : 2018 | Where to see the movie? MUBI | Duration 38 minutes. 17
« Isn't that what you want? The flesh, the death and the stupid... »
A quote fromUltra Pulp as she announces the colour of this short film by Bertrand Mandico. Abyssing a shooting, Ultra Pulp shows the end of an affair between two women, a director (Joy, alias Elina LöwensohnWhat would Mandico's cinema be without her?) and an actress (Apocalypse, Pauline Jacquard) at the close of a fantastic feature film shoot. To keep her a little longer, Joy will narrate five stories from so many experiences she had during the film shoots (in which we will find, among other things, the great Vimala Pons). Tales of women and time, age that one does not want to have and old age that one does not accept.
Perhaps one of the densest shorts in the selection and one of the longest also (30 minutes), Ultra Pulp Extend in Panavision format its image, sharper and less parasitic than usual at Mandico. Erreasing between landing on The Planet of the Vampires of the Mario Bava for a narrative decidedly in touch with a persistent oedipus complex, to sequences of pure cronenbergian creatures (a phone leaving from a vulva-shaped abdominal opening, an arcade game that must be fingered to play there, ...), we find in Ultra Pulp This attraction for flesh coupled with technology. An image that Giger probably wouldn't have denied... Sexual, feminine, nostalgic, a short that we cannot comment on without evoking the splendid music signed Pierre Desprats, very recurring musical artist at Mandico.
Prehistoric Cabaret
Source France | Release date : 2013 | Where to see the movie? MUBI | Duration : 10 min.
Express invitation from Bertrand Mandico in an Icelandic cabaret sordide. A table of guests vegetated under the sieved bluish light of the establishment, at least before a Queen of the night (Elina Löwensohn, again!) accompanied by a few strippers only arrives to present them with a strange organic camera, phallic even, which is about to penetrate the mistress of ceremony...
With Prehistoric Cabaret, carrying an over-year bill of an old TV show with a noisy image, frequently parasitized by a color star or different text boxes, Mandico explores from inside (as is the case with saying !) the notion of scopic impulse. The camera is not just there to possess the other with an objective look, but indeed to penetrate it whole... Carrying the resurgences of a cinema borrowing from Cronenberg its strange mid-machine gadgets, half-living, Prehistoric Cabaret plunges for 10 minutes into a burlesque and terrifying world to bring closer to the no less awesome Society.
Our Lady of Hormones
Source France | Release date : 2014 | Where to see the movie? MUBI | Duration 31 minutes. 22
Two actresses repeating for a play fall on a mysterious creature in the forest: without limbs, sporadically hairy and phallic appearance. Immediately attracted, the strange thing becomes, between the two women who try to tear themselves out, a terrible object of lust.
Narrated by none other than Michel Piccoli (The Mepris, The Beautiful Drowner, ...), we find at the casting of this UFO of course Elina Löwensohn but also Nathalie Richard and Agnès Berthon (recurring actresses at Mandico). If the staging is crazy and full of ideas, we can't help but think of a bastard movie, given birth to an illegitimate union between a post-Argento Argento.Suspiria and a Cronenberg eager for creatures in practical effects. A film of textures – as often at Mandico – but also a film of details, saturating the plan of a thousand visual ideas.
Conclusion
With these few shorts easily available on the Internet, one can get a rather global idea of the heterogeneity of Mandico's visual work (the world, for example, which separates Boro in the box of the We barbarians), its main themes of preference and its inspirations claimed or not. We also hope that it will make you want to discover Conann, the next along Mandico broadcast in theaters from November 29, 2023 !
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