With the presence of the filmmaker. 

For Robert Beavers, the camera is not a simple recording device; it has a very lively quality that surrounds the elements of filming. This session presents two films he made in the 1970s based on a 15th-century painting and the writings of John Ruskin. The construction of images and sounds in these works connects the present with the past and the past with the present in a continual toing and froing.

Lacrima Christi is the longest of the over 150 films made by the Mexican filmmaker resident in Paris, Teo Hernández. Part three of a tetralogy devoted to Christ’s Passion, Lacrima Christi is an exploration of the transfer between desire and myth that takes as its starting point a series of objects found in the flea market of Belleville.

This session presents an experimental animation film by Patrick Bokanowski, a renowned filmmaker who, in this work, continues his investigation into filmic material and the expressionist use of colour, aspects which he works intensively and meticulously in each new piece.

Xcèntric opens the 2017 season with a special extraordinary session: a selection of the home movies of filmmaker José Val del Omar, made from reels from his family archive, accompanied by the live music of Niño de Elche.

In the 1970s, Val del Omar started to film frequently in Super 8. These reels, in the form of essays and notebooks, include the fabulous experiences with image and light that he investigated in his PLAT laboratory, and a series of private recordings (trips, holidays, portraits), that also include variations and experiments on his main themes (water, flowers, the Alhambra…). Transfiguring his most everyday reality, Val del Omar continued the revelations of its mecamystics: “The extraordinary is in the bowels of the everyday […] I feel as though I am submerged in a palpitating being. Logical chains enchain and imprison us.” A selection of these images, rarely before shown in public, can now be seen through the “collective eye” which, for Val del Omar, is the cinema.