Solar Beats

France

2008

18 Min

Color

French

Currently 3.9/5 Stars.
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Patrick Bokanowski challenges the idea that cinema must, essentially, reproduce reality, our everyday thoughts and feelings. His films contradict the photographic ‘objectivity’ that is firmly tied to the essence of film production the world over. Bokanowski’s experiments attempt to open the art of film up to other possibilities of expression, for example by ‘warping’ his camera lens (he prefers the term ‘subjective’ to ‘objective’ – the French word for ‘lens’), thus testifying to a purely mental vision, unconcerned with film’s conventional representations, affecting and metamorphosing reality, and thereby offering to the viewer of his films new adventures in perception. —Pierre Coulibeuf

Director

Patrick Bokanowski

Patrick Bokanowski born in 1943, lives and works in Paris. From 1962 to 1966, he studied photography, optics, and chemistry, under the direction of Henri Dimier, a painter and scholar specializing in optical phenomena and perspective systems. Bokanowski’s first true window into the world of cinema was through the animated films of Jean Mutschler and for a long time, animation remained for him a kind of predilection as well as a privileged ground for experimentation. Patrick Bokanowski, wishing to make his images more expressive, and his forms more fluid, collects rounded, blown or hammered shards of glass through which to film. Not being completely satisfied with this result alone, he then, with the help of specialists, manufactures optics and experiments with reflective surfaces, mirrors (both stable and moving), and mercury baths. His use of the technique of reflective mirrors, through which he films a completely distorted reality, is best expressed in his film, At The Edge of… read more