Pascal Baes | WatchedThis
Pascal Baes
Directing
Biography
Pascal Baes is a French experimental filmmaker, best known for his animated shorts, and a recipient of the Villa Médicis hors les murs award (Répertoire des Lauréats 1980-1994, Ministère des affaires étrangères, 1994, p.125). He also makes commissioned films for advertising and music videos. Born in 1959 in Nice (Alpes-Maritimes), he began by studying biology, painting and photography. It was in 1985 that he turned his attention to cinema, keeping a scientific eye, and specializing in frame-by-frame animation and the stop-motion technique. Literally "stop-action", he experimented with long exposure combined with slow shutter speed, enabling him to "freeze movement and reanimation", creating what was to become his trademark: the "Staccato effect". He works autonomously and extensively on movement and the body, notably through dance with the participation of his partner Aï Suzuki, and also experimented with the use of phenakistiscopes (stroboscopic disks) at his first exhibition in 1997, Kronolome. In 1995, he left Paris for a new location suitable for his experiments, which required freedom and open-mindedness, qualities he found in Brussels. He has also spent time in Tokyo, where the many rejected and unsuitable Japanese ghost stories of the 19th century have been a particular source of inspiration.
Filmography Movies
Acting
Tokyo Picnic
A 16mm time-lapse of Tokyo gives way to footage of amphibious and crustacean goings-on. Soundtrack by DJ Pangeol.
Topic I et II
Long exposure work, frame by frame, in the streets of Prague. "East" atmosphere of confinement and self-censorship, foreboding and deleterious.
Production
HFRemix
Mathematical re-composition of fragments of old 16mm films through a heightfield effect. Images have been digitally enhanced, and blacks and whites have been boosted. The end result is 3D images which create an explosion of light and colour.
Tokyo Picnic
A 16mm time-lapse of Tokyo gives way to footage of amphibious and crustacean goings-on. Soundtrack by DJ Pangeol.
46Bis, rue de Belleville
"Pixilation applied to dance, on the theme of tango." -PB
Test
These experiments for Baes’s stop motion film ‘46 bis, rue de Belleville’ are an art work in its own right. The stop motion technique he uses belongs to the realm of animation. He never handles the camera in an obvious way, but shoots frame per frame in order to come up with a dreamlike staccato effect. With ‘Test’ Pascal Baes sets up his trademark: a low-tech edition of the time-lapse photography, applied to choreography.
FeedBlackJect
Pascal Baes experiments with the reflecting feedback of a video projector in a meticulous interaction with a performance by his life companion Aï Suzuki. In post-processing, the images were digitally edited, which results in an expressionist, abstract study of the human body. With the help of various effects, Baes radically intervenes on the images, mutating shapes, penetrating textures and reconstructing his visual experiment into a psychedelic phantasm of the ‘corpus humanis’ and distorted sensuality. Demographical lines fuse together with shreds of human body and facial traits in a restless outburst of colour, lighting and movement, expanding in interaction with an electronic composition of sliding and lashing sounds into a claustrophobic experience.
Topic I et II
Long exposure work, frame by frame, in the streets of Prague. "East" atmosphere of confinement and self-censorship, foreboding and deleterious.
Gallery
