French-born Canadian multidisciplinary artist Pierre Rovere has been involved in a large number of disciplines: experimental filmmaking, but also video art, installations, performing arts, conceptual art, photography, and graphic arts. After studying cinema in Paris, he was one of the co-founders of the Paris Films Coop in 1974, with Claudine Eizykman and Guy Fihman, and the author and director of a dozen experimental films between 1972 and 1981. Digital techniques have been one of his main focuses as early as the 70’s. In the early 80s, he moved to Montreal, Quebec, where he has had a most varied career in the Canadian avant-garde. After a three-decade hiatus, his focus is now shifting for the most part to photography, as he merges back together his former artistic practices.
“During the 1920s, the filmmakers knew how to use the machine as a visual theme, with its cogs and transmissions. There was a plasticity peculiar to machines that the cinema could exalt by its movement. The modern world, along with electronics, the computer, is considerably poorer in visual themes: is the transport of information in a computer network as spectacular as a speeding locomotive? Yet we find in Pierre Rovere's films a plastic equivalent to this new, not very visual universe. The “coldness”, mainly colors and shapes, which characterizes his works, gives them that tone specific to electronic techniques such as video, which Rovere works in the same way as cinema. The best example is his film made with a computer: Black and Light. The computer-cinema coupling allows the latter to assert its flexibility by integrating heterogeneous languages. From this heterogeneous cinema, video, IT - Pierre Rovere makes the place of his work. ”– Branchements cinégraphiques, 1981
Program:
– Présence (1972-74), 16mm, b/n,sound, 5 min. – Remous (1974), 16mm, color,sound, 4 min. – Black and Light (1974), 16mm, color, sound, 7 min. – Red Light (1975), 16mm, color, sound, 7 min. – Iris (1976), 16mm, color, sound, 9 min. – Zèbres (1978), 16mm, color, silent, 6 min. – Forward (1978), 16mm, color, sound, 18 min.
Total: 56 min.
Screenig format: HD (new 2K digital transfer courtesy of Light Cone)
Special thanks to Light Cone
