2009, 43 minutes, color, sound, video, French with English subtitles
An american stroll in Flanders is a documentary essay composed of portraits of adepts of the American myth in the north of France and Belgium. These enthusiasts might be bison-breeders, collector of weapons from the American Civil War, “Indian villagers,” a Western theater troupe, a group making historical reenactments… all forming various facets of a bygone America whose original has long passed into oblivion — or which lives somewhere within all of us, identical yet different for each, like a genome. I began filming their costumes, their ornaments, their disguises, their make-up, and all these skins of things; then I discovered the subtleties of their respective dispensations: one cowboy draws a private world from the wonder he experienced as a child; another American Civil War Confederate seeks to make life more intense through an alien history in which the role of the foreign is precisely to accelerate the real — but isn’t this what we all expect from fiction?
I read in Leonardo da Vinci’s Notebooks that “every part tends to find its whole to compensate for its own imperfection.” This aphorism touches me because it expresses the loss of an original unity; it testifies to a sensibility for dispersion and estrangement. I wanted to envisage these “Flander Americans” as the little islands da Vinci talks about, and to see myself in them. To try to discover what we want so much from America and what is missing in us; what America says about us that we have shut out from what we can say about ourselves.
Break: 15 minutes
9 pm William Eggleston
Stranded in Canton
1974, 77 minutes, black and white, sound, video, English Courtesy of Twin Palms Publishers*
William Eggleston's pioneering video work, "Stranded In Canton," has been restored and is finally available, almost thirty-five years after it was made.
"Shot in 1974 with a Sony Porta-Pak, the crazily careering Stranded in Canton documents a cast of hard-drinking Southerners with the intimacy, ease and instability of a seasoned participants. Whiffs of Southern Gothic are not new to Mr. Eggleston’s work, but here they rise to the surface--fierce, tragic and proud." –The New York Times
* The DVD of Stranded in Canton and book to which it belongs are a release of Twin Palms Publishers (www.twinpalms.com)
Jacques Lœuille was born in France in 1983. He graduated from the School of Fine Arts in Nantes in 2007, with a special congratulation from the jury. He also graduated from the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Concordia University, Montreal. As a result of his studies in fine arts and cinema, Lœuille has developed a video art practice that exhibits documentary traits. In 2008, Lœuille took part in a master class led by Abbas Kiarostami at the Villa Arson in Nice. He is currently enrolled at Le Fresnoy, Studio national des arts contemporains.
Filmography (student projects): Essence Ordinaire (Regular oil), 2007 - Objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear, 2006.
William Eggleston describes his selection of subjects as “democratic.” He trains his lens on banal things, such as the red ceiling in the guest room of a friend’s house. The thousands of photographs Eggleston has shot over the years form an eccentric, aggregate portrait of Memphis, Tennessee, and the Mississippi Delta. Working primarily with dye-transfer prints, a technique of printing color photographs that yields pure and intense color, Eggleston records this world, not in muted shades of black and white, but in raw, sometimes garish hues. In 1976, Eggleston was the subject of the first exhibition of color photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The exhibition gave a new artistic legitimacy to color photography, which until then had been deemed suitable only for advertising and commercial work. Eggleston has exhibited widely including solo shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2008); the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2007); the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago (2003); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2002); the Fondation Cartier, Paris (2001); the Hasselblad Center, Göteborg, Sweden (1999); the Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen (1992); and the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, DC (1990). His work is represented in many American and international collections including the Art Institute of Chicago; the National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Santa Monica; the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Eggleston’s work has been published in numerous monographs including William Eggleston’s Guide (Museum of Modern Art 1976), The Democratic Forest (Secker & Warburg 1989), Ancient and Modern (Random House 1992), 2 ¼ (Twin Palms 1999), Los Alamos (Scalo 2003) and 5x7 (Twin Palms 2006). He was the subject of a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2008 which will travel to the Haus der Kunst, Munich, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Art Institute of Chicago and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
