Interview Jules Fischer

INTERVIEW WITH DIRECTOR JULES FISCHER

MINDSCAPING THE CINEMA DU CORPS

Q: How would you describe your approach to cinema?

Jules Fischer: The approach I develop further in the short movie Livrées à leurs sens is inspired by so-called cinéma du corps (corporeal cinema, cinema of the body). Extreme close-ups, macrophotography and even a micrograph, are used as tools for discovering everyday reality in a way that goes beyond usual perception. As such, the film exposes its subjects through their profound connection to the material, carnal and visceral. This may create sometimes uncomfortable intimacies.

It shows us the body and the material world as we rarely dare to look at - as an organic mass bearing its natural constitution, chemical behaviour, physical comportment. The signs of wear and marks of a process of decomposition that are barely visible to the naked eye become apparent through the lens of the camera.

Ultimately, the extreme close-up brings us beyond the point of recognition, where the body becomes matter and falls into the realm of the unnameable. This type of visual narrative comes to the point of erasing the borders between the subject and the object, embracing their unity and revealing new structural formations.

A different nature opens itself to the camera than the one available to the naked eye. The camera introduces us to unconscious ways of seeing as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses. We rediscover the world through audiovisual experience.

Q: What do you mean with "Mindscape Cinema" and how does this connect to the cinéma du corps?

Jules: A mindscape refers to a particular non-representational practice in art, especially in storytelling, which refuses to articulate artistic standpoints predominantly by means of conventional, realistic forms of narrative. As a portmanteau, consisting of the words mind and landscape, this concept urges to unfold the inner perspectives of one's mind onto a perceivable “landscape”.

Mindscape Cinema strives to find the most adequate form of transmitting a certain sensory experience, creating a specific world, a universe that initially might be less obvious, yet closer to its quintessential existence. It is thus the larger concept where the cinéma du corps fits in.

The core of this narrative concept is to reflect the perception itself, using cinematic means, to employ all engaged senses in the right manner, rather than creating an audiovisual narrative that will be predominantly plot- or character-driven. Mindscape shaped film builds its narrative fully aware of cinematic potential not just to mimic, reflect or interpret human perception but also to challenge it.

This means that the narrative of the film will be primarily cinema driven, moving from traditionally borrowed narrative structures typical of literature or theatre towards audiovisual mindscapes that can trigger a deeper cinematic experience, engaging not just the senses of seeing and hearing but rather a synaesthetic comprehension of the contents that belong to the film's audiovisual viscera.