Yann Beauvais

Initial situation: models were invited to participate in their portrait by the contribution of personal objects and a great freedom of expression before the camera. This initial situation was conceived by Catherine Rebois. Graffon: I propose to film in a fragmented way these sessions of pose. Participants agree to be filmed at the same time they are photographed. Deliberately sharpened shift between an initial situation in its own duration and its filmic recording. The sequence of photographic shooting sessions is shattered.

Cinexpérimentaux is a series of documentaries on experimental filmmakers, produced and directed by Michel Amarger and Frédérique Devaux. N°8 is dedicated to the most important European cooperative Light Cone created in 1982 in Paris.

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.

The winter Place Sqaure. Two cameras spinning, at the sound of musicians from an orchestra tuning their instrument.

Reel 33 of Gérard Courant’s on-going Cinematon series.

A film about my relationship to New York since 1962. It deals with the distance between a memory and the image of this memory, a distance one always tries to abolish. In this personal film we see the images of a city from a close distance, with autobiographic fragments on the soundtrack. The distance of recollection. The trace of this distance shapes the memory as much as the places, haunted by so many stories, so that our marks will blow up in a crash. A crash leading to a collapse in a vortex of affects.

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.

A found footage film about the war. A film which inscribed his refusal of the manipulation of the media coverage of the last holy war of the American and their allies. No image of that war which was also a media propagandist war. An evocation against the stupidity of war in seven parts.

This film considers the subject of HIV and AIDS from a variety of different viewpoints. On the one hand using textual material in both English and French which appears on screen at different speeds and rhythms, and on the other, articulated by the appearance of human voice on the sound track. It is a story of a person confronted with a civilization which promotes death as a way of life.

Film boundaries explore the garden geometry of the royal paths at Versailles, wandering among gilded statues and dry fountains. Nostalgia for bygone splendor is interrupted by a list of rules describing the married life of slaves. By confronting image and text, the film thus takes an abstract view of the disturbing anachronism of the distribution of power.

VO/ID juxtaposes two separate texts, one in French and the other in English. The texts question art and experimental cinema, the role of the market in shaping aesthetic criteria, and current politics... In each of the texts, words common to the other language appear, creating an indeterminacy of the word to this or that speech. This indeterminacy is increased by the many word games created between the two languages. This results in a double reading: vertical and horizontal, favoured by the word for word. The exposure time of each word depends on the rhythmic of each language, but their appearance in white or black is not subject to it. Faced with these texts, two sounds intervene and otherwise disturb the concentration required by the projected texts. The horizontal reading of both speeches is often in clear contradiction with their meaning. This third visual discourse is playful, brittle, mocking the seriousness of the discourse(s).

Rioting in different countries is confronted within the discourse of some politicians perpetuating the same old colonialisms and responses to a world they don’t understand any longer.

A film about my relationship to New York since 1962. It deals with the distance between a memory and the image of this memory, a distance one always tries to abolish. In this personal film we see the images of a city from a close distance, with autobiographic fragments on the soundtrack. The distance of recollection. The trace of this distance shapes the memory as much as the places, haunted by so many stories, so that our marks will blow up in a crash. A crash leading to a collapse in a vortex of affects.

A trip to Russia by two filmmakers in 1990, forms the bulk of this twin-screen projection, finished some 9 years later; Their super-8 footage mixed in with archival material (and a sprinkling of the classics such as Vertov and Eisenstein).

“How should we describe a work such as TU, SEMPRE by Yann Beauvais? Visually, it consists of roughly 40 minutes of videotext in movement and arrest, largely white text varying in size on a black background, interspersed with a small number of images; its audio is a dirge of drone music by Thomas Köner punctuated by voice-overs by several individuals, sometimes one at a time, sometimes several at once. Text appears in French, English and Italian and voice-overs are in French and English. It is a work of immense complexity and depth and this is but the beginning of a possible description.” –Keith Sanborn

“Reading Rimbaud today means to relate his experiences, his desires, to ours – it means that we see a strong connection between his quest and what is today at stake in gay issues. Selecting pieces of poems and letters I have tried to give back a kind of emergency that I sense within his poetry.” –Yann Beauvais

A Cinetract about a pandemic.

Study of the Mont Sainte Victoire.

A three-part film.

A trip to Riga and Moscow in the fall of 90. Confrontation between the reality of the places and a cinematographic memory of some of these same places.

An activist piece dealing with the Palestinians' right to exist. Gaza, March-April 2018.

Since October 7, 2023, Israel has been waging war in retaliation for Operation Al Aqsa. The scale of this war and the massacres being carried out are taking on proportions that make it a genocide that does not speak its name. Drawing on a variety of sources, the film aims to question these acts, which refuse to be called into question.

The riots in France in June and July 23, following the murder of Nahel Merzouk by a police officer at point-blank range, are reminiscent of those in 2005, and once again demonstrate the systemic racism of the French state. Scenes plundered from various news sources. The music is of Brazilian and French origin.

DERRUBADA NÃO! is a film essay deploying a reflection via an experiment whose objective is to measure the impact of an artistic gesture that crystallizes a set of questions relating to what can be defined as belonging: an ethnic group, a history, a language, a culture..

Amoroso takes up the question of memory concomitant with the filmed diary. A memory of Rome, a memory of Tivoli but also a memory of Kenneth Anger's Tivoli, this sequence could be a tribute or a snub.

A short trip to Buffalo in order to show some of my works, invited by Paul Sharits.

Result of a slow decomposition of 16mm prints of QUATR'UN in Recife. One set was scanned frame by frame and cropped to include the perforations. Dissolution of the frame and mimetic representation in time.

A trip to Russia by two filmmakers in 1990, forms the bulk of this twin-screen projection, finished some 9 years later; Their super-8 footage mixed in with archival material (and a sprinkling of the classics such as Vertov and Eisenstein).

"It is above all a portrait of Miles McKane. Making a portrait, shooting a portrait are all modes of perpetuating/appropriating a person's image. Could a cinematographic portrait escape this rule?" -YB

"...the Arc de Triomphe. Among many variations offered, we have selected about thirty which were cut vertically, horizontally and diagonally. The film, very dense, compact, tries to shape perception by means of specific cinematographic treatments which accumulate contradictory, divergent and paradoxical information." -YB

Mainly sketches of different places crossed: the United States, Versailles and Paris. The film ends with a sculpture by Miles McKane.

This film places side by side the mirrored image of an installation/performance, by the artist Miles McKane. Rather than documenting the piece, the film tries to restitute the spatial dimensions which occurred in the original piece. The participants movements and the panoramic metaphorically reproduce the base element of the installation, namely the white cone.

A pile of cuties. Fashion and its code somehow shaken.

A trip to Russia by two filmmakers in 1990, forms the bulk of this twin-screen projection, finished some 9 years later; Their super-8 footage mixed in with archival material (and a sprinkling of the classics such as Vertov and Eisenstein).

A trip to Russia by two filmmakers in 1990, forms the bulk of this twin-screen projection, finished some 9 years later; Their super-8 footage mixed in with archival material (and a sprinkling of the classics such as Vertov and Eisenstein).

The film is a travelogue of sorts. Ostrovsky’s personal family footage meets the archives of Soviet propaganda footage. The result is a kind of Khruschev-era mix with a collage of Soviet music and a voice-over of my reminiscences of the Cold War era.

Experimental short film

Filmed in August 1997, in the New South Wales, then left to decay for several years in other tropical climates, before being scanned and finally edited in Recife in 2023. A fog partially covering a tropical forest. When I seized these elements twenty years later, the question of the existence of this same forest arises.

In December 2008, before the new elected President of United States become the President, Israel lauches an attack over Gaza, under the pretext of rockets fallen on its territory. This cease-fire rupture answered an attack of Israel which had killed six combatants on November 4th 2008. One cannot thus speak about self defence as Israel prevailed itself about it, but well rather of a war against Gaza. Like Richard Falk says it: “This approach aiming at punishing Gaza was intrinsically criminal: it violates laws of the war and led to crimes against humanity." The film works several types of images and sounds to recover on Internet by confronting them with some tapes of texts.

about a curfew 2006, color, sound, 9'40

This film is a series of shot or found sequences (about, of cities that I frequent) which, in the editing, display a fluidity and continuity eluding narration. The sequences are shaped by the editing according to various arrangements which respect the film possible direction: passage from one place to another, from one moment to another. To pass, bridging one point to another, is to transform oneself, become other. The film employs certain leitmotivs which relauch the flow and facilitate diverse transformations of scattered sensations. This film, although renewing lyricism, does not deny formalism which it uses in another manner, while taking into account the meaning/possible meanings produced through linking images and their evocative passage.

Remarks on the recent war in Lebanon.

The winter Place Sqaure. Two cameras spinning, at the sound of musicians from an orchestra tuning their instrument.

Disjet uses the movement of an anonymous figure in isolated environments to examine metaphysical journeys through the landscapes of the mind.

"Take the path >>>>Still Life>>>> Hezraellah >>>>> of a curfew>>>>> exonerating affection" – Edson Barrus

R is a very simple film, flickering and panning which in its silence induces a fugue of rhythms. The center part of the film is a transcription of one of J.S. Bach ’s Invention.

Trap for the voyeur, his expectations are thwarted each time, disappointed and yet he always hopes...

The is the first filmed diary made by Yann Beauvais.

Mis en pièces means in French taking into pieces, but it could mean to set up a play, or to deconstruct a play. The film is about a theater play which is shot against the medium theater. This film is an attempt to destroy the representation of the perspectivist point of view. Disorganizing a process to see…

Extract taken from the longer diary dealing with United States in the summer of '78.

Either the meter: unit of measure. Either the frame: space time unit within the film strip. Either 24fps: speed unit of the apparatus. Either the screen: canvas without retina, the meter at it’s square. Either the projection: the meter taken to its cube. The sum total of these units produces its meaning. Abstract value or short essay on communication, the meter dictates, tires us by its arrogance, its relentlessness. The tacit agreement is what is at stake in this film whose screening at the limit is superfluous. In this sense it also questions the measure of the maitre.

In Éliclipse, postcard images of Parisian landmarks are cut into vertical bands; every other stripe of the image is replaced with a corresponding stripe from another postcard image, resulting in the blend of the figuration of the two images

A film about my relationship to New York since 1962. It deals with the distance between a memory and the image of this memory, a distance one always tries to abolish. In this personal film we see the images of a city from a close distance, with autobiographic fragments on the soundtrack. The distance of recollection. The trace of this distance shapes the memory as much as the places, haunted by so many stories, so that our marks will blow up in a crash. A crash leading to a collapse in a vortex of affects.

Trailer for the XV Janela Festival in Recife. A nod to a few films from the history of experimental cinema that may have gone off the rails.

A condensation of my philosophy master that I had written between 1974 and 1975. My first film as text.

RR uses musical models as a paradigm. The central part of each section of the film is based on a transcription of a Bach composition for two voices. The two screens underscore this paradigm insofar as one is always the simultaneous reflection of the visual development of the other, regardless of the position of the reels (left or right): a visual representation of the inversion technique of a theme that is often used in music. The use of mirroring deliberately side-steps the question of the reality of representation. It no longer has any importance, now that we’re in the domain of the reflected image, of imitation. The two images reflect one another in a constant back and forth, mimicking to a certain extent the development of the (fake) pans that comprise the film. The pans metaphorically evoke, if only superficially, the keyboard.

First sketch of a new work featuring the movement of objects and devices. From one screen to another, without changing platforms, we change trains or boats. Zazie is no longer on the subway.

With QUATRE UN we are in the presence of four images (from the film R) each of which reflects the adjacent one, horizontally and vertically. The notions of the development of a theme, of inversion, of mirror and retrograde inversion thus seem deployed, as if some of the figures of musical discourse were suddenly proposed visually. Moreover, the device of this installation makes the beams of the projectors cross two by two in order to constitute an image in the center of a given space. Two projectors, one above the other, face two others separated by a double-sided screen.

Artist Dona Ana makes clay figures, "carrancas", in a studio on the outskirts of Petrolina, in northeastern Brazil.

Artist Dona Ana makes clay figures, "carrancas", in a studio on the outskirts of Petrolina, in northeastern Brazil.

Artist Dona Ana makes clay figures, "carrancas", in a studio on the outskirts of Petrolina, in northeastern Brazil.

Artist Dona Ana makes clay figures, "carrancas", in a studio on the outskirts of Petrolina, in northeastern Brazil.