Frédé Devaux's films follow two directions: the disappearance of the image by adding to or taking away from the film material; and the signs encountered in everyday life or in the imagination. She also creates spaces for these works, either as installations or within the film frame, by welding, sewing, fracturing or other forms of deconstructing and restructuring.
Born in October 1956 in Paris, Frédé Devaux is a professor of art and cinema at the University of Paris and the Louis Lumière school. Author of numerous works on art and film, in particular Dziga Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera, The Leftist Cinema, Interviews With Isidore Isou and many articles, she is currently preparing a book on the relationship between cinema and the arts. She has published magazines and co-produced three films by Isidore Isou. From 1982 to 1986 she co-founded and co-organized the International Avant-Garde Festival of Photography, Film and Video (FIAG) in Paris. She has made three dozen experimental films and documentaries since 1980.
From film to film I often use the same images, to refer back to the universe I have created, to show that my work constitutes one oeuvre. I also often push farther a technique that I used earlier. In UN FILM BRÛLÉ (1984) I had ripped a film down the middle and shifted the two sides, creating a big gap and rendering the film unprintable; all that was left of the film was a soundtrack. Here I have made holes and ellipses in every way possible, then sewed the film back together following an aesthetic mode, in a celebratory end-of-century apocalypse of positive, negative, super-8, regular-8, black and white, color, saturated and faded found footage. Pictures sewed onto other pictures so as not to fall through the gaps between them, this is only a pretext to rejoice that cinema is not dead, that many things are still possible. One only has to join together these images that could have easily otherwise disappeared. Gluing color to color, frames or even fragments of frames become cuts of their own, in every sense of the term.
1999, 16mm, color/so, 6m, $20
Fragments in diverse shapes, mostly circles and dots filled with various imagery. Occasional vertical blurs give the film an original, more abstract, rhythm. Edited directly in the optical printer, the found footage images were chosen according to my convictions: there is thus a certain derision in weaving and intercutting the faces of anonymous and serious men with these obviously naïve, complacent juveniles taking communion. I tried to make each frame a painting; I hope it's not incongruous to stop on each one a few quarters of a second.
1999, 16mm, color/so, 4.5m, $20