ISMAÏL BAHRI | FILM À BLANC

20 March - 25 April 2015 17 rue des Filles du Calvaire 75003 Paris

In Film à blanc, the images rub shoulders and influence each other in small ways. The nuance - that is to say, the minute difference - would be the principle of a mechanism where the motif of Tunisia would appear intermittently. Landscapes, bodies and voices appear in bits and pieces. In all the videos exhibited, it is less a question of capturing the "event" than of missing it. Attention is shifted to the margins, to the place of epiphenomena. As an echo of this general mechanism, voices come to us. They reveal a little of what underlies the whole, of what is woven into the white of the images. Film à blanc proceeds by outcropping. Without ever breaking the screen, the exhibition gravitates around the film of the event. Like the film still buried or unprinted, the question of "potential film" runs through the entire exhibition. And it is from this point that the title resonates: the "blank film" is never fully activated, it carries within it gaps; latent denouements. Loaded with blanks, these films seem active by their very inanity and give themselves over to potential projections.