Metro meditation

A film by Benoît Labourdette (7’, 2017).

27 November 2017. Published by Benoît Labourdette.

1 min

To be there without being there, not to be there by being there. To be above all within oneself. Meditate. In the subway.

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All the films in « Short films »

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The men on camera

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Visual composition, music and sound, from a noisy flying camera, referring to the movie “The Man with a Camera” (Dziga Vertov, 1929).

The red jars

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Man domesticates nature. For good or bad reasons? Maybe it’s a little more complicated than we thought. Hints for a philosophical reflection

First

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A former disused hotel on the Place du Capitole in Toulouse is the scene of an inner musical divagation.

Myopia

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Myopia can be triggered by trauma. We are left with poetry.

Pascal’s flowers

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Invent a tale. Ground the story into reality. Why does the shape of the tale in 2011 ? Probably to make again metaphor, universal. A simple love story.

The book

A film by Benoît Labourdette (3’27s, 2018).

Gather around a book, gather yourself.

Made in China

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Plastic animals are talking to us.

Little moon

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I try to look further, to feel deeper.

Openings

A film by Benoît Labourdette (3’51s, 2013).

Paradoxical injunctions in school space of a College, with a musical treatment.

Back in time

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What if, what if, what if... sometimes you wish you could turn back the clock.

I parked my scooter

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“I parked my scooter, I lost my scooter. If someone found it, he can bring it to me.” Small musical and visual variation humorous.

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Palimpsest of confined lives, of pictorial references, of nascent love, of graphic and audiovisual performance, between Paris and Nantes in 2020.

What do you fear?

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Make a list of your fears, to maybe trigger something.

Blue eyes

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Facing our child, real or imagined.

A tree in tears grows again

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Life after.

Fire (white monkey)

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At night, when anxiety is there, if one dares to look beyond the ashes of life, one can see an image of salvation.

Perpetual motion

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Ode to childbirth by a young adult.

Barcelona hotel

A film by Benoît Labourdette (4’44s, 2012).

Autofiction on adultery.

Sands Hotel

A film by Benoît Labourdette (6’28s, 2016).

Remember the presence of the lost loved one in a hotel room surrounded by sand.

In their absence

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There are times when you have the feeling, if not the certainty, that you’ve missed the point.

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What is life? Can simple little plastic animals help us find the answer to this question?

Door

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Listening at the doors. A deeper, poetic and contemplative exercise than one might imagine at first glance.

Teachers’ lounge

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Everyday life without apparent problems, in this teacher’s room of a high school near Paris. But it conceals dark secrets... a fiction inspired by real events.Ten years after the making of this (…)

The fear

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Sensitive sharing of therapeutic indications to fight against fear, this kind of fear present inside of each.

Poster

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A touch film, made of paper and words.

Each morning

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Charles, 37-year old boy who lost his mother a year ago, sometimes perceive the world in a distorted way, multiplied, time and space losing their reality. A meeting will change his life.

Reserved for nurses

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The trace, in the places, of the stories and dramas that took place there. A reserved parking space, another reserved parking space, empty at the moment we look at them, but which have seen so (…)

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Time stands still. And then life returns. Pain is life. Sweetness is life. Replications. Messages. Double helix. Heal. ExtensionsWhen we live through borderline or traumatic experiences, we may (…)

Cold fire at the castle

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At times, past, present, fiction and reality are intertwined. The present moment becomes a tale.

FrEE zonE

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The remembrance of a drama, and an unexpected confession.

Trio

Experimental film by Benoît Labourdette (7’26s, 2015). With Marta Zielinska and Senghte Vanh Bouapha.

A couple of “Living ghosts” emanate from the walls, floors, windows, of an old apartment.

At the Venice stadium

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A traumatic event disrupts the past, the present and the notion of reality.

The event

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Observe what is going on behind the eternal appearances.

Memory Palace

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How can a simple place become the crucible for the revelation of our childhood memories?

Animals at the window, the hill of light

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Eat the animals or not? What if the animals speak for themselves?

No picture on screen

A film by Benoît Labourdette ( 2’54s , 2015).

The mystery of physiological processes at work in a movie theater.

Here lived filmmaker Boris Lehman

A film by Benoît Labourdette (8’50s, 2013).

The visit of an empty Paris apartment, where several people lived successively. Memory fumes artists Sophie Calle and Boris Lehman.

Fragile hopscotch in the sky

A film by Benoît Labourdette (3’31s, 2019).

The inner experience of a moment of pedagogical innovation in the classroom.

City lights

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Our two eyes see left-right with a gap, before-after with memory, front-back with their mobility; they create relief and depth.

Nature

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Getting back in touch with nature is not that simple.

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The intimate perception of the inner voices of passing humans, which leads to a choice of life.

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Life was a gift.

I’ve seen you

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Where is our body ?

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“When the eye, emerging from the darkness, suddenly sees a luminous object, it will seem much larger at first sight than in the long run.” Leonardo da Vinci, Notebooks (optical).

The hand

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Man’s hand is what gives him speech.

Are you calling for help?

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Step by step, the quest for life, meeting a tragic fate.

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Reading of the last paragraphs of “’Remembrance of Things Past” by Marcel Proust. Links between literature, painting and movement.

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Dead animals are helplessly witnessing human violence.

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A film by Benoît Labourdette (2’15s, 2018).

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A film by Benoît Labourdette (1’, 2019).

Paris as seen by its paper directory in 2019.

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A film by Benoît Labourdette - text by Sonia Leplat (1’28s, 2021).

Thinking, overthinking...

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To see oneself in front of the roots of a tree.

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Where is cinema ? What is cinema ?

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Abstract shapes, children color from the sky.

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From the eroticism of the musical instrument.

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At times, time and space are reversed.

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A meeting, like a thousand other meetings. No, it is your meeting.

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A meditation on the construction of one’s own memory, one’s “memory palace”.

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Metro meditation

A film by Benoît Labourdette (7’, 2017).

To be there without being there, not to be there by being there. To be above all within oneself. Meditate. In the subway.

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“Accident on a white desert dune. There are only wrinkles left.”

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How to accompany the one who is no longer there?

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Preparations for a cinematic event.

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A contemplative journey through the energy of light, between nature and electronics.

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Not yet understanding the disappearance of his child. Looking for him. Not finding him. Try to change the perspective.

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A film by Benoît Labourdette (4’36s, 2018).

Contemplative quest for meaning in an abandoned summer camp.

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If I had known, if I could have, and yet I was always there.

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On the way to autofiction, a conversation between a father and his son, played by the same voice.

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In Vitrolles, in the south of France, a rocky peak overlooking the city. It is found scattered clothes and a mobile phone, in which there was a movie and a text. The work of a madman, it seems, (…)

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How to find oneself and the world after the shock?

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Music softens morals.

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One foot in front of the other, but where to?

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A station dock, a Flip camera on the ground, the voice-over of the stationmaster, waiting travelers, a train arriving...

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How can we give a place in our Life to those who have left?

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The adult world, incomprehensible to a dominated, abused child.

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Short films

I make short films as a painter makes paintings, usually in a lonely way, away from academic practices of making cinema. Some films are made in a very spontaneous way, others can take years to mature. I explore the meeting between the image and the world. These are experimental works, which often also tell stories...