On the occasion of the arrival in Paris of the filmmaker Daïchi Saïto, who just won the Tiger Award at the Rotterdam International Film Festival with his new film Engram of Returning, we invite you to an experimental movie night Thursday, February 11, 2016 at 20h at the Finnish Institute.

The 35mm format is the most used of the silver film cinema. Considered the "standard format", it measures 35 millimeters wide and has in its edges rectangular perforations to ensure its traction by the various mechanisms of shooting and projection.

Everyday millions of hand-held self-portraits, or ‘selfies’, are uploaded on to the internet. With today’s personal technologies, private self-representations-made-public seem symptomatic of Guy Debord's ‘Society of the Spectacle’ or Jean Baudrillard’s ‘Simulacra and Simulation’. Yet for decades, experimental filmmakers and video artists have interrogated questions of self-identity and -referentiality. With the performing body as the site of action produced in relation to the film apparatus and video system, they offer a powerful critique of the male gaze and, in turn, the seeming narcissism at the center of today’s ‘selfie’ culture. A diverse range of artists and traditions have thereby subversively taken up subjective, first-person cinema and issues of self-performance in order to explore questions of identity, power, memory, and the construction of the self. ‘Mirror Me’ presents a selection of musings on the mirroring of the ‘self’ in self-reflexive film and video auto-portraits and personal diary films in order to weave together something of a ‘pre-history’ of the ‘selfie’.

Curated by Pascal Richard and Christopher Zimmerman