A text put into images … A text about body, about what it is ... I had once asked a friend, the writer and scriptwriter (Wild Side of Sébastien Lifshitz) Stéphane Bouquet, to write it for me. Through his text, his words, I chose to give my own definition for body. If, in a way, each word has a collective signification (linguists call this denotation), at the same time it has a private, particular, one (connotation), depending on one’s own self, on your own history, your vision of the world. When I read the word brother, I think and I see a field of corn. And when I read body, what do I think? The film Torso is an answer to this question, a connotation attempt: for me, body almost automatically leads to torso, towns, geography; I hardly know why and it is not that essential. More important was for me to elaborate a visual narrative based on Stéphane’s text. I had to unfold the words into something that was fictional—gestures, faces, a plausible story for cinema, even if the story is vague, elliptical, more experimental than classical. This work gave birth to a film, which I entitled Torso. Torso is a combination of two visual projections. The first film is projected virtually with Stéphane Bouquet’s text on a black background. Super-8 images appear upon this background as in vivo overlays projected from mask-equipped cylindrical devices (cylindroscope) put at a focal distance of three Super-8 projectors. Louis Dupont
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