Body Pixel

One of the heaviest and nicest experiences I had lately in a way of moving me forward optically and artistically was live act ‘Performance for four 16 mm projectors’ by duo Lafoxe from France I saw at 25fps.

Real psychedelic journeys through the history of cinematography, showing at the same time how vulnerable celluloid film can be… melting the image (and me!) permanently with their cinema poetry…

Lafoxe (c)

Lafoxe has irresistible visual perception built up as heavy machinery / artillery based on hand processed films and projectors making almost a celestial drive for the audience like an analogue DJ/VJ…

They are incredible improvisers who aren’t leaving any of frames or sounds out of the structure…

Lafoxe (c)

By not hesitating in their live act, they brought out the uncompromising attitude of Lafoxe’s approach to the media…

It’s like a retro cinematic VJ-ing with actor James Stewart as the main perpetuator, linking old Hollywood scenes into bigger visual / sound volume with bold, synthetic finesses by marking technological aspects of the film industry as a meta-poetic language.

Lafoxe (c)

Lafoxe call themselves a live performance duo, but they are much much more… analogue hackers using cut’n paste technique not as a sort of statement ‘look what we just did, isn’t it assome!’ but a mental experience which is a little bit heavier to look at and perceive longer during screenings…

Lafoxe’s equipment

Here is explanation by Lafoxes, Gaëlle Rouard and Etienne Caire about their work:
‘From 16mm found footage sound and visual (mainly Hollywood ones), images are shooted, processed, printed, coloured and added special effect in our handcraft laboratory. The soundtrack of films is worked over again on films itself. This performance is a game of disassembling conventional narrative mechanic, film existence is building during the projection: each of us has an amount of images and sound in which he picks up to feed the growing movie.’

Lafoxe (c)

‘A cinema whose ultimate transformation is definitively not placed on the film.’

Lafoxe certainly makes you think a little bit more on interactions between analogue techniques on one side; and pure digital stuff on the other side… they reminded me on that how passionate electronica or experimental musicians can be, when having dreams regarding their desirable music gear, and some of them are: owning an original Moog keyboard, to get hands on Theremin, or to clean dust from beautiful Hammond organs…

Lafoxe (c)

Gaëlle Rouard and Etienne Caire are modest and quite experimentalists being focused primarily on their performances… and I thank them for that, coz I will have an echo of ‘Performance for four 16 mm projectors’ for a longer period of time…

VIVA LA ANALOGUE!!!  ¯\\>_<//¯

p.s. I’ve picked you up very interesting interview from Digicult’s webzine Digimag issue 33 featuring Lafoxe… it’s on Italian…
p.s.1. how may their performances look like could be easily seen here …