Touch Tablet

2019



Video editing, 88 mn.

Touch Tablet is a video editing that develops a complex network of correspondence between a short fragment of Theorem by Pier Paolo Pasolini and different religious paintings in the History of Western art. The editing revisits several poses of Terence Stamp and Massimo Girotti (who play the characters of the Visitor and Paolo in the film), gathered in a black-and-white photograph album, by the prism of different compositions of Descent of the cross, Pietà and Burial of Jesus painted between the 15th and the 19th century which were superimposed on the photographs by effects of transparency.

While inscribing photographs in a form of representative tradition and continuity in relation to the religious paintings presented, Touch Tablet deploys a wide range of variations around related themes. The editing thus helps to point out the diversity and formal inventiveness of the works that follow one another despite the constraints and the codes imposed by the nature of the subjects covered.

In the very process of scrolling the references and the effects of overprint carried out between the film excerpt and the paintings, the editing animates the tortured figures and the models captured by the photographer (Odetta, played in the film by Anne Wiazemsky, whose hand are shown manipulating the album and the index linger on one of the Visitor’s portraits). It presides over various effects of emerging and incarnation, disappearance and erasure, transformation and mutation which decline some of the themes at work in the various paintings presented.

In the caressing flow of back and forth which structure the editing and the succession of pictorial evocations on which it is developed, Touch tablet is divided into a duality which opposes dread and ecstasy, death and life, triviality of everyday life and the sacred, even tradition and modernity. By emphasizing the ambivalence at work in our interpretation of images and the diversity of approaches which are left at our disposal to approach them, it translates what is likely to be created in the mind of the viewer in the very process of analysis.

The title of editing and the modes of appearance and disappearance of images offer a direct reference to the touching modes of access to the images that technological developments have imposed in recent years. They introduce a contemporary framework of perception which more directly implies the viewer and even more blurs the temporality of the images presented to underline its modernity.

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Copyright © 2016 Laurent Fiévet