Editor

22 FEBRUARY - 12 MARCH 2012
11 am - 9 pm, ADMISSION FREE
SOUTH GALLERY, SPACE 315, FORUM -1 SMALL ROOM AND LARGE ROOM

The third New Festival at the Centre Pompidou offers the public the chance to discover the diversity of the visual culture of our time and to appreciate how the territory of contemporary culture has broadened.

No fewer than one hundred artists including the film director Guy Maddin, visual artists and performers, writers and historians, musicians and show-men, explore new ‘ways of creating worlds'. They have been invited to this third New Festival which brings together, among other things, memory and childhood, ghosts and spectres, teleportation and dreams of experiences.

Guy Maddin is a familiar figure at the Centre Pompidou which showed a substantial retrospective of his work in 2009 (Guy Maddin, The Magician of Winnipeg - from 15 October to 7 November 2009). However, A New Festival offers the film-maker the opportunity to carry out an actual film-making exercise in the Centre itself. Through ‘Spiritisms', Maddin works with lost or abandoned scripts and projects of great figures in cinema such as Vigo, Von Stroheim and Mizoguchi, among others, rewritten with the help of the American poet John Ashbery.

These seventeen short films (each between three and five minutes) will be filmed daily in front of the public and the film produced will be broadcast live on http://spiritismes.centrepompidou.fr.

The spiritual dimension of Maddin's project involves him invoking the spirits of these unfinished film projects before beginning each session of filming, putting his actors into a trance state, the original set being a room designed for spiritualist seances.

The Spiritisms project therefore echoes the last full-length film by the director ‘Keyhole', based on the logic of dreams...

These 17 sessions of ‘spiritisms' will be brought together in an ambitious international project, launched at the Centre Pompidou, which will also include some one hundred other short films, made during the Biennale in Sao Paolo and at MoMA in New-York in particular. Guy Maddin's idea is to create a site which would enable the surfer to combine a certain number of these films in a random way, by his choice of word-object-sound combination. Narratives will thus be formed from different short films, each time creating a new combination.

Shootings with Amira Casar, Géraldine Chaplin, Mathieu Demy, Adèle Haenel, Udo Kier, Ariane Labed, Isild Le Besco, Maria de Medeiros, Jacques Nolot, André Wilms.

Lignes de la main (Palm Lines), from a film by Jean Vigo (France, never made), with Luce Vigo

Bits of Life, from a film by  Marshall Neilan (United States,1921)

The Blind Girl, from a film by Alfred Hitchcock (United Kingdom, 1960)

Blue Mountains Mystery, from a film by Lottie Lyell (Australia, 1921)

La femme rêvée (Dream Woman), from a film by Alice Guy (United States, 1914)

Fist of a Cripple, from a film by Tetos Dimitriadis (Greece, 1930)

Gardener Boy Sought, from a film by George Schnéevoigt (Denmark, 1913)

Idle Wives, from a film by Lois Weber (United States, 1916)

Tu ne tueras point (Ladies of the Mob), from a film by William Wellman (United States, 1928)

Poto-Poto from a film by Erich Von Stroheim (Germany, undated)

Ivresse (Intoxication), from a film by Ernst Lubitsch (Germany, 1919)

Strength of a Moustache, from a film by Mikio Naruse (Japan, 1931)

Thérèse Raquin (or Shadows of Fear), from a film by Jacques Feyder (Germany, 1928)

Over Barbed Wire, from a film by Alexandre Dovzhenko (Russia, never made)

Resurrection of Love, from a film by Kenji Mizoguchi (Japan, 1923)

Tararira (Dead Love), from a film by Benjamin Fondane (Argentina, 1936)

Centre Pompidou

75191 Paris cedex 04

France

Telephone:00 33 (0)1 44 78 12 33

Metro: Hôtel de Ville, Rambuteau

Opening times: every day except Tuesday, from 11 am to 9 pm

All of the New Festival has free admission except for shows in the Large room.