Artist statement
A car identified with the camera travels around a closed circuit a certain
number of times. There it will find, with each lap it makes, a screen on which
there are a number of scene-images of a shadow play; as the car travels it
will encounter behind these the elements and characters of which they are
formed. The film takes the road movie as its point of reference, and in this
sense place the character, and the spectator too, in a situation of transit
between one scene and another, so that they build up an exeptionally critical
or dissonant relationsship with their surroundings. Like road movies, it is
organised into episodes, an episode starting each time the car sets out on
a lap. The pictures appearing on the screen are from shadow-play scenes, a
construction method that brings the picture closer to the world of stories,
of tales, of dreams and of childhood.In them the leading players - a man,
two children and the house - are seen as stylised. The pictures show the domestic
universe becoming inhospitable for those who inhabit it and the struggle they
wage to adapt. Sur L`Áutoroute deals with the nature of images and the way
they are produced. It reconstructs a space through a journey, in a narrative
that changes ceaselessly, illustrating the idea that the best way to recount
a picture is by means of another picture.
The right distance
What video and cinema (specially experimental cinema) have in common is
that they question themselves on the relationship of the spectator with image,
in order to “decondition” his perception. They go through our visual habits,
and disconnect our patrons of thought, of vision.
Jean Renoir said that theater was inseparable of the enterprise consisting
on experimenting roles, until one found the role that, exceeding theater,
entered life.
There is a distance, characteristic of any work of creation as such, between
fiction and the reality that corresponds to it, and between its creator and
the audience to whom it is addressed. Signifying that distance is the purpose
of this work.
SYNOPSIS
A character lives in the images. He rehearses postures in relation to them.
He rehearses roles trying to enter the world -does seem to enter it at times-,
a world made out of heterogeneous and shifting images that drive him out to
his loneliness as they shift again and again. They force the character to
shift with them and to take other possible postures, to reach a sociability
that maybe doesn’t exist anymore as we used to know it. POL, the character,
lives in a world of images. In the closed space of the set, and in front an
enormous backprojection screen, he takes on postures that allow him to inhabit
the images proposed to him by the world. When the images are those of an improvised
party at a terrace in a Mediterranean city, he “attends” it, trying to act
like one more of the people invited. He strolls through the party, trying
to fit in the conversations; when a group of people starts to dance, he dances
along with them. Outside of the screen, he has, at times, the illusion of
being in the image, of sharing the moment with the other people invited, his
movements going along with the movements of the images and the camera. At
the party, he gets around obstacles and behaves gracefully and discreetly,
but although he approaches the waiter serving drinks several times, he never
manages to get a drink. POL looks for the best possible posture between the
images and the camera, but he will only be able to achieve that ideal posture
for a few seconds: the shifting images showing up in the screen will push
him to other places, other situations, will force him to take on new postures
and new identities.