Christian Lebrat Movies, TV Shows, and Filmography
Christian Lebrat
Directing
Biography
Christian Lebrat, born in 1952 in Paris (F), is an internationally acclaimed artist with a career spanning over 30 years. He is a filmmaker, video artist, performance artist and photographer, as well as a publisher, curator and writer. Since 1976 he has created over twenty experimental films, videos, and film performances, along with a formidable body of photographic work. In the last ten years he has had over a dozen major retrospectives of his films in different international cities. He began working in photography in 1978 and has been exhibiting regularly since 1982. Recent solo exhibitions in Marseille, Pantin (France),TorontoandItalyshow new works in film, video, photography, and sculpture. His works are in several public collections, such as: Musée national d'art moderne (Centre Pompidou), FNAC, FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Bibliothèque nationale de France. In 1985 he founded Paris Expérimental (http://paris-experimental.asso.fr), a publishing company entirely devoted to publishing theoretical and historical texts on avant-garde and experimental cinema. He has published several essential books on the subject and edited the monumental anthology on French avant-garde film, Jeune, Dure et Pure! Une histoire du cinéma d'avant-garde et experimental en France (2001). He has also published a collection of essays and lectures on his own films (Between images, Paris Expérimental, 1997) and a compilation of his texts (Radical cinema, Paris Expérimental, 2008). As a curator he has also organized several retrospectives, amongst them Jeune, dure et pure! Une histoire du cinéma d'avant-garde et expérimental en France (Cinémathèque française, Paris, 2001), Le Cinéma visionnaire: l'avant-garde américaine (Paris and Rome, 2002), and Maurice Lemaître et le cinéma (Paris, 2005). His most recent recognition include: 2007 Prize of the MoCCA (Museum of Contemporary Cinema, in Madrid) for Ultra, film performance for 2 x 16 mm projectors and loops. His video V1 (Vortex) has been acquired in 2008 by the Fonds National d'Art Contemporain (French public collection) and most recently his "historical" film Organisation I and performance Liminal Minimal have joined the Centre Pompidou Collection.
Filmography Movies
Acting
Cinématon
Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.
Cinématon XVI
Reel 16 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series.
Melba Film Coop
Covers the making of the multicolored magazine for technological arts, Melba, edited by Claudine Eizykman and in which Guy Fihman, Dominique Willoughby, among others, were active participants, with 5 issues published between 1976 and 1979.
Portraits / Mirrors
A single-screen version of the Portraits / Mirrors multi-projection. Featuring portraits of: Aloual, Gaël Badaud, Raphaël Bassan, Yann Beauvais, Jean-Michel Bouhours, Gérard Courant, Berndt Deprez, Bertrand Gadenne, Mythia Kolésar, Christian Lebrat, Stéphane Marti, Pascal Martin, Michel Nedjar, Dominique Noguez, Vivian Ostrovsky, Bernard Roué, Martine Rousset, Alain Sayag, Unglee, and Catherine Zbinden.
Production
Out of (K)nowhere: un film d'Anne Prat
Very little was left of the film by Anne Prat, a brilliant student who studied cinema with me at the University of Paris in the 1970s. Anne Prat was not just any student. Three weeks before summer break in 1976, even though she had not taken part in any of practical lessons, she presented a short film, shot in the Brakhage style, which surprised all of us with its technical mastery. She informed me she was going to stop studying and go to Australia, and that her film was just the beginning of a larger and more complicated cinematographic work. She had left me the material for her film at the university, in a big box, and asked me to pick it up. At that time, I had no idea I would never going to see her again… (C. L.)
V3 (Collapse)
Swallowed in the emptiness with a dull and gloomy noise, the face gradually vanishes with a recurring rocking motion.
V1 (Tourbillons)
Filmed at night, with no manipulation. The hypnotic effect of the image, composed of abstracts motifs, in dialogue with the enigmatic sound track, ponctuated by micro-sound events.
V5 (Zip Zap)
V5 (Zip-Zap) progresses via a tight, interweaving montage of rapid sequences, which were filmed directly from a CRT TV screen.
V4 (It Could Happen to You)
Filmed unexpectedly on the port of Genoa, the jazz music resonates with the lights of the city. The video loop, multiplied and worked on during the editing, induces in the spectator a kind of spatio-temporal hypnosis reinforced by the light patterns that change status and the "depth" of the sound recorded live...
Organisation II
In Organisation II, the vertical colored strips (red, yellow, and blue) whose height matches that of the screen move laterally while flickering on and off.
Organisation III
First works with pure color. The slits are organized into vertical Yellow-Red-Blue strips which move laterally across the screen according to a pre-calculated order.
Liminal Minimal (I & II)
To come back to abstraction, I have a feeling that colour varies in my work between two aspects: the colour-object that comes from the sensation of an object, in this case the film strip, and the opening. This colour-object permits the transporting of objects into space, to explore the space of the screen in the theatre; this is what allowed me to develop Liminal Minimal (1977) by enlarging the space of projection with two projectors and, taking into account that the vertical strips evolve on a black background comparable to the darkness of the theatre, I was able explore the whole space of the projection with the coloured strip
Gallery
