By Kaitlin James
On Friday night the $100 Film Festival welcomed Alexandre Larose as part of their festival featured retrospective. Larose has been making experimental films since his graduation from engineering school in 2001. He has since attended Concordia University to expand on his filmic techniques. Larose was welcomed to give a presentation on the process of his filmmaking.
Larose in contrast to narrative filmmakers, almost at times relies on a happy accident and because of the nature of his films this works for him. Larose often times, as part of his creative process is left to create ways in which the camera can capture the new and strange. For his film Ville Marie (2006- …) Larose and a long time collaborator had to create an apparatus in which could with stand having a camera thrown off a multi-story building. For Ville Marie the process of creating this apparatus is what has shaped the filmic narrative. Ville Marie was conceptualized as a sense of falling, and losing ones self within that space, a dream Larose recalls with slight confusion.
For Artifices #1 (2008), also shown Friday night, along with the rest of Larose’s film collection, the idea of time-delayed images is what propels the film. Larose was left to create an apparatus in which, had to physically move through space and be portable and still able to capture images on a time delay. The result for Artifices #1 is streaks of light across a black screen. By capturing cars driving within a tunnel and a apparatus which could physically change the image, by rotating the camera Larose creates an almost tunnel like effect. Accompanied by the almost eerie sound of driving through a tunnel the film maintains a strange quality, which the image becomes more intense, while the sound stays the same and the audience is left to escape somewhere in the tunnel itself within a stream of light.
Brouillard (2010) the most recent film by Larose, is an almost other worldly experiment with filmmaking. Larose attached a camera to himself and simply walked along a path, starting on a highway, walking through his parent’s house, outside of Quebec and finally arriving at a lake. Larose completed this journey almost 15 times, and once finished he layered the images on top of each other, where they were able to maintain a ghost like quality about them. The images do not show clearly Larose’s journey through space, but at time are able to allude to the journey, the audience is never sure which part they are seeing, the film simply moves through space. Supplemented by a simple sound track of the journey itself the over all affect is supernatural.
CSIF
