LA CITE FEU - DARROW - MOEBIUS.

LA CITE FEU - DARROW - MOEBIUS -

Career Timeline: 1984 - City of Fire
In 1982, Moebius met an aspiring artist named Geof Darrow, who sought Moebius out while working on Tron in Los Angeles. They became friends and, two years later, collaborated on a portfolio of prints that they called La Cité Feu, or City of Fire. Consisting of 8 prints, Darrow penciled each piece while Moebius inked and colored them. City of Fire had a print run of only 500 copies, making it one of the rarest of Moebius’ publications.

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ARTIST WALL

Artist Wall | Maya Israel hosts Jacques Fhima

Maya Israel: Your works deal with verbal and visual codes

The abandoned books, the old camera, the quotes, humor, food, writing, stamps, postcards, the protagonist, the movie, the locations, landscapes, people, memory, music, archive. Where does it all start Jacques? I am interested to hear about home, about Jacques the curious boy, about the evolution of your visual language.

Jacques Fhima: Ever since I can remember, I have been working with space and material. My work is very close or identical to the work of the archeologist. I look at my place and try to understand the components, and then the composition. I look for the material and through it understand the history of the space. Early on, I edited a fanzine of sorts, a single-copy magazine made of collage and text. My room was turned into a library of what could be found on the street, for a creative kid, the trash of Paris was rich in treasures. I did not shy away from carrying tons of magazines from the Opera to La Bastille, my bag was always full. 

MI: Memory, Residue.

Used materials, ancient cinematic techniques, make me think of time travel, your travel through time. As someone who sees beyond the mountain.

You communicate from your own place, mostly emerge from your works as a multidisciplinary maker, as a self-taught artist, who spread around himself any finding from the environment that went out of conceptual and emotional use, studied the materials, set them ablaze with words and images and transmits them, who is the addressee?

JF: The significant influence, in terms of conceptual art and philosophy, is drawn from Dada and the philosophy of the French revolution of 1968, and most of all Guy Debord. I started by writing texts and manifests, poetry, performance and experimental cinema in the early 1970s. Already then I was on a search for the possibility to capture space and time with a pocket camera, a pencil and a typewriter. I was too young to take part in the events, but I managed to get into places like the Modern Art Museum of Trocadero, Grand Palais, the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle du Jardin des Plantes, The Musée national des Arts d'Afrique et d'Océanie de la Porte Dorée, the curiosity in the anthropology and topography of the city, the library and the bookshop were at the center of my attitude towards forms of new art. I was completely self-taught and my culture as a mosaic. I was a novice, there was no one to ask about the way, I have created my path and my public is universal. 

 MI: Transformation, from a mouse, to an enlightened prophet.

You inhabit your works, you do not only address things.

You are the actor in the movies, you are the cinematographer, you are the director. What about the limits of the piece. What are the limits of cinema or any other artwork you create?

JF: The point of departure is quantifiable. I have found that so far at the "midlife" point the entirety of my writing add up to 300,00km of words and creation. 300,000 km per second is the speed of light. In order to understand the definition of the speed of light the common example is of a man who lights a candle on Earth and the light takes a second to travel to the moon.

We are talking about different levels of the term "journey" whether it’s the light's whether the train that travels backwards, and of course also the possibility to create the wall, or some sort of installation of the postcards that talk about a fabricated journey. All the parts of the installation speak of time units. Fragments that together become the narrative of "The Pantheon", while during the journey there is the transformation of the character from a mouse to an enlightened prophet. 

MI: Artist's Wall

I have invited you to exhibit at the Artists' Studios, I personally am very connected to your work, your interest in the collective subconscious, the movement and the eyes.

What in the verbal and what in the visual of the Artist's Wall on which you were invited to exhibit…

JF: The situation I have created for the Artist's Wall is at the same time a unit of conduct in time. It is composed of an action included in the shaping of the experience of the moment. Gestures which are the product of desire and of themselves. Other forms of design and gestures are created.

Anyone who takes part in the adventure can find a field of positive action, there is an attention towards the general atmosphere. Anyone can have what he likes, what is attractive, and what is important. It is not the individual structure of the thought or an account of the structure, it is the possible proposal in a constructed situation.

Installation, screening the films animation Lardux, the screening of the film "The Pantheon" and an artist talk.

GERDA TARO and ROBERT CAPA

Gerda Taro and Robert Capa: love in a time of war

Capa and Taro lived, loved and died on the frontline, becoming the most famous war photographers of their time. As a new novel about them is published, we explore their real relationship.

 

Gerda Taro and and Robert Capa: reinvented themselves and war photography. Photograph: Fred Stein Archive/Getty Images

It begins with a photograph. In 1934 a struggling Hungarian photographer, André Friedmann, living in exile in Paris, is commissioned to take publicity pictures for a Swiss life insurance company's advertising brochure. On the lookout for potential models, he approaches a young Swiss refugee, Ruth Cerf, in a café on the Left Bank and convinces her to pose for him in a Montparnasse park.
Because she does not entirely trust the scruffy young charmer, Ruth brings along her friend Gerta Pohorylle, a petite redhead with a winning smile and a confident manner. So begins the most iconic relationship in the history of photography, and an intertwined and complex story of radical politics, bohemianism and bravery that, in the intervening years, has taken on the shadings of a modern myth.
Together, André Friedmann and Gerta Pohorylle would change their names and their destiny, becoming Robert Capa and Gerda Taro, the most celebrated visual chroniclers of the Spanish civil war. Together, too, they would change the nature of war photography, reinventing the form in a way that resonates to this day. Capa went on to become the most famous of the two, and arguably the most famous war photographer of the 20th century due to his visceral images of the D-day landings on Omaha Beach in Normandy. His most famous quote would become a dictum by which ensuing generations of war photographers worked: "If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough."

This brave, but cavalier, approach to getting pictures of the action from within the action would cost both Gerda Taro and Robert Capa their lives – the former killed on the frontline of the Spanish civil war in 1937; the latter blown up by a land mine in Indochina in 1954. The myth of Robert Capa and Gerda Taro continues apace today with the British publication of a novel called Waiting for Robert Capa by Susana Fortes, a Spanish novelist and teacher.

 

When the book is mention to Jimmy Fox – veteran photographic historian and erstwhile director of the famous Magnum agency, which Capa co-founded with Henri Cartier-Bresson – he says: "I was dismayed by the novel. It was so fluttery and sugary. I think it is wrong to elevate the romance in that way. Capa was a flamboyant guy, a great drinker and a womaniser who had so many lovers, including Ingrid Bergman. Taro found the love of her life in Ted Allan, the man who was with her when she was fatally wounded. But of course that does not fit the big simplified romantic version so neatly."

The independent filmmaker Trisha Ziff, who directed The Mexican Suitcase (2010) about the discovery of a hoard of unseen negatives by Capa, Taro and David "Chim" Seymour, concurs. "Waiting for Robert Capa is a fiction based on a romance, but it is also a romance based on a fiction. If it becomes a Hollywood film, the myth will no doubt take over."

 

If there is one thing all the experts agree on, it is that nothing was straightforward about Robert Capa and Gerda Taro's relationship. Shortly after their first meeting, the young André Friedmann was sent to Spain on an assignment for a Berlin-based photo magazine. He subsequently photographed the Holy Week procession in Seville and described the festivities to Gerta Pohorylle in a letter that also mentioned how much he was thinking about her. On his return, he spent the summer holidaying in the south of France with Gerta and her friends. According to Ruth Cerf, quoted in Alex Kershaw's book Blood and Champagne: The Life and Times of Robert Capa, the pair "fell in love in the south of France" despite her suspicion that he was "a rogue and a womaniser". If the young Gerta was fascinated by his waywardness, he in turn was taken by her independent spirit. "Here was a woman," writes Kershaw, "who didn't suffocate him with affection, and who was as unashamed by her sexuality as she was conscious of her outsider status in Paris as a German Jew." This gets to the heart of the couple's mutual attraction: their shared radicalism and acute sense of exile. Friedmann had departed his native Hungary for Berlin in 1931 soon after his arrest by the secret police for leftist student activism. In February 1933, aged 19, he had fled Berlin when Hitler assumed power, travelling to Vienna, then back home to Budapest, before departing Hungary for good in September to live in penury in Paris, where he met Pohorylle on that fateful day in 1934.

By then, she too had experienced radical politics, arrest and flight. Born to bourgeois parents in Stuttgart in 1910, Pohorylle joined a young communist organisation and, around the time Friedmann was fleeing Berlin, was distributing anti-Nazi leaflets and putting up communist propaganda posters on walls under cover of darkness. She was arrested by the Nazis on 19 March 1933 and interrogated about a supposed Bolshevik plot to overthrow Hitler.
On her release, she used a fake passport to travel overland to Paris, where she was looked after by a communist network. Both André Friedmann and Gerta Pohorylle, though still young, were already seasoned activists and exiles when they met, intent on forging new lives for themselves while also staying loyal to their radical leftist roots.
Though Friedmann could seldom afford to buy film and often had to pawn his camera to survive in Paris, he schooled Pohorylle in the rudiments of photography and found her a job in the newly formed Alliance Photo picture agency. And she, it seemed, anchored him – at least for a while. "Without Gerta, André would not have made it," the late Eva Besnyö, another Hungarian photographer who mixed in the same bohemian circles in Berlin, told Kershaw. "She picked him up, gave him direction. He had never wanted an ordinary life, and so when things didn't go well, he drank and gambled. He was in a bad way when they met, and maybe without her it would have been the end for him."

As Friedmann's photographic career tentatively took off in Paris, his younger brother Cornell joined him, developing the photographs taken by André as well as those of his friends, Henri Cartier-Bresson and David "Chim" Seymour, in a darkened bathroom in a hotel that overlooked the famous Café du Dôme. It was there that the three photographers mingled with philosophers, writers and artists, drinking and dreaming of better times. It was around this time also that André Friedmann and Gerta Pohorylle became Robert Capa and Gerda Taro in a shared act of self-reinvention that still seems daring today.
The first anyone else heard of Robert Capa was when the couple turned up at the offices of Alliance Photo and announced they had discovered a famous American photographer of that name. The pair soon found they could sell photographs attributed to the fictitious Capa to French photographic agencies for three times the price of Friedmann's, such was the status accorded visiting American photographers. Their joint ruse was soon discovered, but the pseudonyms remained in place. In her essay for the exhibition catalogue Gerda Taro: Archive, published in 2007, Irme Schaber notes: "Taro and Capa were not merely reacting to their precarious economic situation. They were responding as well to the antisemitism of Germany and the increasing antipathy towards foreigners in France. And to elude the stigma attached to being refugees, they spurned every ethnic or religious label."

 
If their joint self-reinvention was the first significant factor in the dramatic trajectory of Robert Capa and Gerda Taro, the second was their decision to go together to Spain in 1936 to cover the republican resistance to Franco's fascist rebels. Like many writers and artists, including George Orwell and André Malraux, they went there out of political conviction and scorned any notion of journalistic detachment. The fight against fascism was, in a very real and personal way, their fight, given their history as exiles and refugees, and the Spanish civil war was the literal and metaphorical frontline of that battle.
It was an adventure, though, that almost ended as soon as it had begun, when the plane hired by the French magazine Vu to take them to Barcelona crash-landed in a field on the outskirts of the city. The pair limped into Barcelona to find scenes of ferment and disorder as anarchist forces took over the city. There, they photographed young republicans leaving Barcelona for the frontlines. Then in September they travelled together to the front themselves, arriving in the village of Cerro Muriano near Córdoba, where they found, and photographed, crowds of villagers fleeing their homes as the fascists rained shells down on the village. In one famous series of pictures, Capa captured Taro crouched, camera in hand, behind a wall beside a republican soldier. In another even more famous picture, perhaps the most well-known war photograph ever, Capa caught a militiaman at the very moment of his death from a sniper's bullet.
In that split second, the legend of Robert Capa, war photographer, was born, and decades later that same image would become the centre of a debate that still simmers over the ethics and veracity of war photography. In Waiting for Robert Capa, Fortes writes: "Death of a Loyalist Militiaman contained all the drama of Goya's Third of May 1808 painting, all the rage that Guernica would later show… Its strength, like all symbols, didn't lie in just the image, but in what it was representing." Fortes also imagines Taro gently probing Capa for the story of what really happened that day, and him replying: "We were just fooling around, that's all. Perhaps I complained that everything was far too calm and that there wasn't anything interesting to photograph. Then some of the men started to run down the slope and I joined in as well. We went up and down the hill several times. We were all feeling good. Laughing. They shot in the air. I took several photographs…"

Though the context of the photograph is still contested, the imagined conversation does describe what probably happened that day just before a Francoist sniper returned fire from across the hills, killing the militiaman who was running down the hill for Capa's camera. "People want the truth from war photography more than they do from any other kind of photography," says Jimmy Fox, the Magnum picture editor who has worked with the likes of Don McCullin and Philip Jones Griffiths, "but a flat surface of an image is not the reality and never can be."
In Spain, Capa soon developed a reputation for taking photographs whatever the risk, setting the tone for war reportage as we now know it. Taro, too, was often seen running across the battle lines with her camera, her bravery matched by her recklessness. She travelled back and forth to the frontlines, shooting what she saw, often driven by a mixture of humanity, political commitment and a shrewd understanding of the power of the photograph to shape public opinion.
Throughout 1937, Taro visited several frontlines, either with Capa or on her own. They managed to return to Paris for a short vacation in July that year, celebrating Bastille Day by dancing in the streets below Sacre Coeur and, according to Schaber, hatching "great plans for the future". Taro then returned to Spain alone, despite the growing concerns of her friends who, having seen her recent photographs of the fighting, feared for her safety.

Defying a ban on journalists travelling to the front, she once again made her way to Brunete with the Canadian journalist Ted Allan, her close friend, travelling companion and soon-to-be lover. According to Allan's diaries, written later, they spent "mornings afternoons and evenings together chasing stories... For three or four weeks we were constant companions. And finally, one afternoon, we ended up in her hotel room." She told Allan: "Capa is my friend, my copain," and said she might be travelling to China with him. "Nothing was settled," wrote Allan. "Everything was possible."
On Sunday 25July, the pair found themselves trapped in a foxhole near Brunete as bombs fell around them relentlessly. Taro kept on photographing, often holding her camera high above her head to capture the carnage. Allan protected her with a film camera as shrapnel and rocks fell around them. Then, as republican troops began pulling out of the area, Taro and Allan ran out of the foxhole and hitched a ride on the running board of a car while the planes continued to strafe the retreating convoy. In the chaos, the car was then rammed by an out-of-control republican tank and the couple were thrown into the dirt. Transported to a nearby field hospital, Taro died from her injuries in the early hours of the following morning. She was 26. The injured Allan did not get to see her again. According to Irene Golden, the nurse who was on duty, her last words were: "Did they take care of my camera?"

Gerda Taro's funeral in Paris was attended by tens of thousands of mourners, including Capa, Chim and Ted Allan. Orchestrated by the French communist party, which claimed her as one of its own, it became, as Schaber puts it, "a spectacular manifestation of international solidarity with the Spanish republic". In death, Gerda Taro became a hero. Robert Capa went on to become the most celebrated and mythologised war photographer of the century until he, too, died in action in Indochina in 1954 at the age of 40. "He never talked about her," says the photographer Ata Kandó in The Mexican Suitcase.
Gerda Taro has now fully emerged from the shadow of Capa as an important photographer in her own right. Many photographs attributed to him – they initially shared the byline CAPA – have now been identified as hers. "She was a pioneering woman both as a photographer and a political activist," says Ziff. "She was very liberated for her time, putting her work before any more traditional female role. She had reinvented herself – but the Capa myth was so strong that, even when she died, some newspapers described her as Robert Capa's wife. Their lives were entwined, but she was very much her own woman, and he knew that. They both believed that their photographs could change the world and change the way people think. And their photographs did."


For details of The Mexican Suitcase, go to themexicansuitcase.com. Robert Capa: The Paris Years 1933-54 by Bernard Lebrun, featuring pictures by the photographer, is published by Abrams, £24.99; and Waiting for Robert Capa by Susana Fortes is published by HarperPress

ANNIE BOUSQUET et GILBERTE THIRION

ANNIE BOUSQUET.

Annie Bousquet was Austrian born but became famous as a female French driver in both rally and circuit races. With her racing career starting in 1953 in a Renault 4CV, she moved up the rankings beating many male and more experienced competitors. She had her first serious accident at Agen that year, when the Panhard DB 500 she was driving overturned in a corner that she took too quickly while trying to keep up with a very experienced racing driver. But after a month in hospital, in 1954 she was given the opportunity to race a Porsche, 550-05 which was originally built as a showroom car but was sold to Jaroslav Juhan. She raced it to 8th overall and 2nd in the “Coupe des Dames” just behind Gilberte Thirion’s 356, in the Tour de France Automobile with Madame Beaulieu.

Although married with a daughter, Annie was the girlfriend of Porsche Racing Manager Hüschke von Hanstein at the time. He asked Josef Jeser to let her drive with him in Paris in his white 550 Spyder – 550-0016. In return, he would help Jeser with support in the upcoming Le Mans race. In 1955 she was co driver with him in the 2-litre class. When the race started in Paris, there was a serious accident with a driver losing his leg. Annie was so afraid that she didn’t continue racing that day. Jeser apparently drove for more than 20 hours in a row – using Pervetine, an opium based drug from the war to stay awake, taking 2nd place overall in the 24 Heures Gran Prix de Paris – Bol d’Or at Montlhéry.

Early in 1956, Annie’s husband was killed in a road accident, skidding on ice near Saulieu. Continuing her racing career, she then signed with Triumph and was 4th in her class in the 1956 Mille Miglia at the wheel of a TR2, and in June 1956, she raced at the 1000 Kms of Paris at Montlhéry in the Maserati 150S of Alejandro De Tomaso.

She still found the thrill of the Porsche 550 appealing and bought a French blue spyder, supposedly 550-0043, which she got the factory to make upgrades such as a wrap around windscreen plus other body and engine modifications.

She then entered the 12 Heures de Reims in the 1500cc class in July. She was to share the Porsche 550 Spyder with Isabel Haskell from the US, but crashed on the 17th lap at the bend before Muizon. Travelling at over some 170 km/h, its left wheels ran off the race track and the spyder fishtailed and barrel-rolled, ending in one of the wheat fields that surrounded the track. Bousquet was ejected during the rolls, and laid some fifteen metres from the car, bleeding profusely from skull fractures. She was taken to Centre Hospitalier Universitaire in Reims, where she died from her injuries.

In the run up to the race, she had driven her Porsche Spyder to Zuffenhausen for the modifications and, having collected it, drove back to Reims just in time for the practice sessions. It would appear that she had not slept properly for at least one, if not two nights. She was however, determined to start the race and do the first hours. Richard von Frankenberg, winner of the race with Claude Storez, believed that her accident was due to the fatigue brought on from the previous days.

After the accident the Automobile Club de l’Ouest, organizers of the Le Mans 24 Hour race, banned female drivers from competing, a decision only revoked in 1971 when Marie-Claude Beaumont drove a Corvette there.

The corner in which the accident happened, between Bretelle Sud and Bretelle Nord, was named in her honour.

Anne Bousquet au Grand Prix d'Agadir 1955.

GILBERTE THIRION 

La personnification humaine de la voiture supersonique est une jeune femme brune , mince, jolie, dont les pieds se deplacent sur les pedales a la vitesse d'une soucoupe volante, dont chaque geste est plus rapide qu'une fusee .
Il appartenait au pays des beguinages, des villages tranquilles qui remontent vers les collines, ainsi que des ruiseaux vers leurs sources, de donner une image fulgurante de la championne du siecle.Sur l'Europe rassie et inquiete, entre deux angelus qui s'effacaient sur les pierres Flamandes, la Belgique a envoye la plus dynamique des jeunes femmes.

Ferrari built seventeen 500 Testa Rossas in all, and 0620 MDTR was constructed mid-way through their production as the only example completed to left hand drive configuration. It is recorded as being supplied new to D'Oro of Italy, though no note is made of the person's use of the Ferrari.
The car's racing career began at the 1956 1000km of Paris at Montlhèry on 10 June 1956, where the car was driven by the French female duo of Anna Maria Peduzzi, who it may be assumed was now the owner, and Gilberte Thirion. Thirion was a successful Belgian privateer, who had a successful career racing Porsche 356s, Gordinis, Mercedes 300 SLs and Renault Dauphine, was often partnered by her father Max. On this occasion, they brought the car home in 10th place overall and won their class, a very respectable debut for the car.
Two weeks later the same pairing campaigned the car at the Monza Supercortemaggiore, wearing number 62, as illustrated in photograph from the paddock showing the car in its original racing guise, most distinctively because of its left hand drive form.

En 1952, elle a vingt-quatre ans et se rend au Salon Automobile de Bruxelles avec Papa. Elle y découvre le stand Porsche où on expose un modèle spécial de course en aluminium. C’est le coup de foudre pour cette belle allemande. De conception plus ancienne que les nouvelles voitures de la marque « en acier », cette Porsche « Gmünd » a l’avantage de peser quelques 200 kgs de moins que celles-ci. Ce modèle s’est d’autre part distingué aux dernières 24 Heures du Mans où il a à la fois remporté sa classe et où il a enlevé la première victoire (de catégorie) d’une voiture allemande dans une « grande épreuve » depuis la guerre.

Max Thirion voudrait offrir cette auto à sa fille mais Pierre D’Ieteren, l’importateur de la marque, refroidit aussitôt son enthousiasme : la Porsche en aluminium vient d’être vendue à un client gantois, le directeur des vente « Auto Occidentale » son plus gros distributeur dans le nord du pays. Heureusement, ce fortuné propriétaire n’utilisera qu’une seule fois sa nouvelle acquisition, pour se rendre à Knokke-le-Zoute avec une de ses jeunes conquêtes. Il la trouvera dangereuse… et beaucoup trop rapide ! Papa Thirion suit de près les frasques de ce papy-séducteur et lui propose de racheter sa voiture,… ce qu’il accepte.Il revient donc un soir à la maison au volant de la Porsche Gmünd n°356/2-061.

Ce sera le début d’une carrière triomphale qui va durer cinq ans, qui verra Gilberte égaler, pendant un temps, les meilleurs pilotes de la planète et qui s’arrêtera aussi brutalement qu’elle avait débuté.

Elle mit fin à sa carrière en 1957, après une unique course disputée, aux USA lors des 12 heures de Sebring (35^e au général, et seconde de classe). Cette décision est à lier avec l'accident mortel de son ancienne équipière Annie Bousquet à Reims, quelques mois plus tôt.
Elle fera cependant, toujours sur Dauphine Spéciale, deux brefs retours exceptionnels à la compétition, lors du Tour de Corse 1957 en équipage avec son époux, Roger Merle, puis lors des Milles Miglia 1959, associée alors à Paul Frere ainsi qu'un autre victorieux en 1959 comme copilote de Olivier, au Tour de Belgique.

Elle rangera alors définitivement ses gants et son casque pour fonder une famille.

Le 30 avril 1957, Gilberte Thirion épousera, à Cannes, Monsieur Roger Merle. L'extraordinaire montée en flèche, qui a fait de Gilberte en deux ou trois ans la championne incontestée du monde, sans titre officiel, simplement parce qu'on n'a pas encore songé à en créer un pour les femmes, ne lui a nullement fait tourner la tête. Pour preuve que ce mot charmant qu'elle a eu après l'attribution du Trophée National du Mérite Sportif, alors que toute la presse belge et étrangère faisait entendre un concert d'articles plus élogieux les uns que les autres, Gilberte disait : « je lis tout ça, j'écoute tout ça et j'ai vraiment l'impression qu'il s'agit de quelqu'un d'autre... »

Ses souvenirs resteront enfermés dans des malles pendant très longtemps. J’ai eu la chance de rencontrer Gilberte Thirion à de nombreuses reprises et elle a fini par m’ouvrir le coffre de ses trésors secrets. C’est avec émotion que je vous en fais partager quelques uns.

 

ASTON MARTIN DB2. Le Mans 1951. Slow Motion

Documentaire d'Archives a propos de la participation des Aston Martin DB2 aux 24 Heures du Mans 1951, face aux Jaguar C et Cunningham C2R.
#24 Aston Martin DB2; Parnell-Hampshire  7em
#25 Aston Martin DB2; Abecassis-Shawe Taylor     5em
#26 Aston Martin DB2; Macklin_Thompson    3em
#27 Aston Martin DB2; P.Clark- Scott       13em
#28 Aston Martin DB2; Mann-Morris Goodall     10em

"PANTHEON" .Film Bolex 16MM et 816. Paris 1986.

"PANTHEON" .Film Bolex 16MM et 816. Paris 1986.

Un Film Experimental de Jacques Fhima, en Kodachrome 40 et Noir  et Blanc. Une ascencion vers la nef Centrale du Pantheon a 82 metres du sol. Attention ,gare au vertige. Poursuite infernale entre une souris et un Professeur de Chimie qui se transformera en Mage. Ode a l'Architecture et a la peinture neo-classique. Tourne en plein hiver avec un soleil d'enfer.  Comediens: William Abello et Jacques Fhima. Production GOUMEN et Abello.

 

 

 

Le Portrait de Marguerite Gauthier

Le portrait de Marguerite Gauthier. Video 8mm Couleur
Muet et Sonore de Jacques Fhima. 1988

Realisation d'un film loufoque et dejante par la bande des Goumen de l'epoque en Video 8mm, avec Ariane Licha, William Abello, Jacques Fhima, Christophe Sartori, Francois Prudhomme..etc
Dans les premiers decombres deblayes du Studio Goumen, 2 bis Cite Aubry, par force travail, en lumiere naturelle, a l'ancienne parcequ'il n'y avait pas encore de toit. Une petite perle a decouvrir car jamais edite tel quel.

 C'est l'age d'or du Studio Goumen, ou tout est permis et ou on se permet tout. Fucus entre la reparation du toit et Abello entre deux decors, ainsi que Sartori, en profitent pour faire un film dont le fil conducteur est un portrait photographique du debut du siecle dernier, taxer a Bernard le broc. Un regal de clownerie et d'impros.

RAMDAM, Studio Goumen 1992

RAMDAM, FR3, 1992.

Realise par Anne Pastor pour FR3, Le Premier et magistral documentaire sur le Studio Goumen, donnera au lieu son assise et sa reconnaissance definitive dans le monde de la creation et de l'imaginaire. Goumen est ne d'un reve impossible sur les ruines d'une usine de fabrication de meubles appartenant a Melle Septfons. (voire historique). Dans un prochain post je publierais les rushs concerves dans la Cinematheque Tarkus, mais pour le moment regal de quelques minutes.

MY OWN PATH

My most important influence in term of concept in Art and Philosophy came from the Dadaist and the Situationist.I start writing text and manifests, poetry and collective revue, performance and experimental movies. At the beginning of the 70's i was already in search of the possibility to capture space and time with a little pocket camera, some pencils and a typewriter . I was too young to be involved in events, but i succeed to get in places like the Modern Art Museum of Trocadero, The Grand Palais, The Museum d'Histoire naturelle du Jardin des Plantes, Le Musee des Arts Africains et Oceaniens de la porte Doree.I was curious about  anthropology  and topography of the City, the Library and the Bookshops where in the Center of my approach of New Art Models. I was a complete autodidact, and my culture was Mosaic and novice.....I had nobody to ask the way, i made my own path....

As far as I remember myself, i am  and will always deal with space and material.
My work is very close or similar with the work of Archeology. I look at the place i am and try to understand the component , and then the composition. I search for the material and through it understand the history of the space. The second thing is that i love books, or more precisely paper and every printed material....from writings to comics book.
In the early years,  I start to edit kind of fanzine, one copy magazine made of collage and text. My room started to be an Encyclopedia Library of what is possible to find in the street, and the garbage of Paris where very rich of treasure for a creative child. I was not afraid to carry from Opera to La Bastille tones of magazines, books , piece of woods.....my bag was always full.
So i was very aware very early, of what is composition, creation, plastic art...because of an eternal curiosity, i was always finding myself in the Museum, i made friend with some people in Beaubourg and getting free entrance to see exhibition of contemporary Art...I was involved with project dealing with artistic capacity in school and outside....never stop searching, creating, writing and be in communication with this world who became very familiar to me......

My first big work started the 4th of July 1977 and was called "Investigation" by Goumen Produktion.
I was working for a summer job for IBM, and was in contact with the first photocopier.....for one month the copier never stop to work......i was printing everything I found....every text, every picture.....it was a crazy work of copyist, between 1000 to 1500 copies......
After this experience, I was always looking for a job that put me in contact with some printer......

In October or November 1977, in the closet of a friend house, I found my first movie camera...i ask if i can take it and i make my first movie in 8mm, and i never stop still 1998...one movie a week, 20 years of non stop filming in this format.....

Looking for a place to create;
My room was not big enough, so in 1983 I start to investigate the City for a big place, usually abandoned to film, picture, built or create.......in 1985 , in the winter i enter a big factory who was burn down, and without no permission, i start to work in it....after 3 years it became a big Artist factory and i stay in till 1995......my brother continue for ten more years....the place has been demolished one year ago......

So with all those process, i develop my own techniques, accumulate, analysis of the place, creativity and presentation to a public or a different source.....I left behind me, the memory of me; construction, experience, knowledge, solidity.

In fact my conclusion can be the word; Memory.

 

 

PRELIMINARY MANIFESTO FOR THE CONSTRUCTION OF A SITUATION APPLIED TO GOUMEN.

PRELIMINARY MANIFESTO FOR THE CONSTRUCTION OF A SITUATION
APPLIED TO GOUMEN.

The concept GOUMEN of a "constructed situation"
is not limited to a single use of artistic means contributing to a "mood" , so great can be the spatio-temporal extent and strength of the atmosphere.

The situation GOUMEN is in the  same time, unit behavior in time.

It is made of actions contained in the decor of a gesture moment. These gestures are the product of decor and themselves. They produce other forms of decors and other gestures.

How can we direct these forces?
How can we contribute to the construction of a situation GOUMEN?

  We will not settle for empirical testing environments which we expect surprises, by mechanical provocation.

Actually the experimental direction of the activity of GOUMEN is the establishment  from desires more or less clearly recognized, a favorable field of temporary activity to these desires.

Each of those who participate in this adventure to find a field of positive activity, has the listening of the general atmosphere to realize.

Everyone should get what he loves, what attracts and what matters , is not the individual structure of the mind, or the explanation of its formation, it  is its possible application in Goumen constructed situation.