TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

Or/Aour, Vienna. Radical Love Study (Jacques Perconte, 2019), by Vincent Sorrel^[3]

The flight of a bird is a representation of the ungraspable, and it inaugurated cinema in 1890 when it was chronophotographed by Étienne-Jules Marey. For Or/Aour, Vienna. Radical Love Study (2019), Jacques Perconte filmed swallows with a Sony RX100 camera equipped with powerful binoculars (10 × 42). Their flight was filmed at a rate of 100 images per second at a high shutter speed (faster than 8/1000 of a second). As with Marey,^[4] the flight was fragmented into images and its movement was fixed one hundred times per second in very accurate images thanks to the very high shutter speed. But the camera program which Perconte uses encodes the images and optimizes the flow of digital data by evaluating the information according to parameters decided by the manufacturer. To economize data, only a few images are preserved in their entirety according to a purely mathematical logic (the 12th, 25th and 40th images), or because, according to the machine’s analysis, they document an important step in updating the flow. The image-stages, commonly called keyframes, are key moments when the information set changes. Apart from this group, most images disappear and are mathematically recomposed by differential comparisons of the information: analytical algorithms try to recognise what is identical in order not to have to re-document what does not change from one image to the next.

Jacques Perconte upsets this technical dimension of digital video with a paradoxical act: he reduces or increases the video flow and removes or replaces certain keyframes. In this way the filmmaker creates an overflowing in the logic of economizing information which leads to the loss of images; instead, he reveals a plastic sumptuousness by reversing the logic of compression: the images reappear at the same time as the artefacts of their technical infrastructure appear. “These artefacts could be seen as aberrations, as errors, as glitches, but they are, on the contrary, the signs of the liberation of the forms: I want people to see the true history of the images,”^[5] he explains. In a political gesture which destabilizes the systems in place, Perconte liberates images from their normativity, rendering them more sensitive to disturbances, whether those of nature (hot or cold air currents) or those that the filmmaker provokes from the mechanical reality. He re-invents the technology out of its limitations, which he overcomes in order to restore the duration, movement and history of the bird’s flight, which technology separates and fragments while sublimating it.

In addition, Jacques Perconte steeps his images of the flight of swallows in gold. To do so, he replaces the first keyframe of the birds sequence with a photograph he took of a painting which Gustav Klimt covered in golden leaves. Perconte photographed The Kiss at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna and then filmed the birds at the foot of the museum outdoors, on the lower tier of the complex. His filming of the bird created a connection between it and himself, shooting it in a kind of dance which the slow motion further softens, but also, through the technical precision obtained by means of the very fast shutter speed and sharp focus, he took on the lightness of the bird’s flight, which becomes a wave: the sharper and more contrasted the image of the bird is, the more its movements will have an effect on the bitmap structure of the images. On screen the bird, exploring the physicality of the digital image, upsets the macroblocks of pixels on its path. Perconte has turned his act into a metaphor by creating a poetic image of an encounter between the nature of the image and the image of nature. By mastering photographically the extreme sharpness of the bird’s movement, he gives rise to a kind of stand-off between reality and technology: although the handling of information separates the bird from the sky, Jacques Perconte, by using the same means, seeks to re-inscribe it in this ensemble.

By liberating the image, Perconte has also liberated time, and the fixed image of the painting imbues the rest of the film with its forms and its colour. Without keyframes, there is no more discontinuity in the film. The film’s matter is not replaced, only updated; the colours drift. Fluidity is not an impression but a technical reality: that of constant metamorphoses and the dilution of the images in each other. The junction of two shots – the fixed image of the painting and the flight of the birds – is no longer a point of montage but rather a point of merging. The painting’s colours imbue the images of the birds the way the information which conveys the parameters of the birds’ flight acts on the body of the images of the painting, creating movement in the chromatic material of the painting. The act which transforms the paramaters of reality, and those of the machine, exists since the beginning of the Cinématographe, the device conceived by Louis Lumière and whose name means “the writing of movement.” Jacques Perconte does not act directly on the images, but rather on the computer files which constitute their matter. The machine conveys movement in its language and the filmmaker rewrites the algorithmic logic. He takes the data of an image to see what that produces if he blends them with those of another image. He thus acts on their reality, which he disturbs to see what this produces in the logical flow of data, and to give back all their power to the elements he manipulates, until the birds “lose their bodies and blow up before our eyes.”

It is not by chance that Jacques Perconte revisits cinema’s early forms because, as it was for the pioneers, it is a question of exploring its possibilities. From Marey to Perconte the flight of a bird has not changed, seizing it is no longer an event in itself, but cinema has become digital and it is by working on the digital material that the bird’s flight is made marvellous. A Lumière picture seized the imponderable^[6] through space and time. By liberating the images, Jacques Perconte works with the matter of time, of light and colours. His Cinématographe writes movement and re-writes it until the picture becomes, with Or/Aour, Vienna, a Lumière vision: “The alchemist’s quest does not distinguish between love, gold and light, for everything is the history of light. Owr in Hebrew is the light of day, the light of the moon and the stars.”