Patrick Bokanowski - L"Ange (1982)

"During the seventy minutes of The Angel, viewers see a series of distinct sequences arranged upward along a staircase that seems more mythic than literal. Each of the sequences has its own mood and type of action.... At times, Bokanowski’s imagery is reminiscent of Etienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotographs.... The film’s most elaborate sequence takes place in a library in which nine identical librarians work busily in choreographed, slightly fast motion. When the librarians leave work, they are seen in extreme long shot, running in what appears to be a two-dimensional space, ultimately toward a naked woman trapped in a box, which they enter with a battering ram. Then, back in the room with the projector, we are presented with an artist and model in a composition that, at first, declares itself two-dimensional until the artist and model move, revealing that this “obviously” flat space is fact three-dimensional.... Bokanowski’s consistently distinctive visuals are accompanied by a soundtrack composed by Michèle Bokanowski, Patrick Bokanowski’s wife and collaborator. Like Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), Bokanowski’s The Angel creates a world that is visually quite distinct from what we consider “reality,” while providing a wide range of implicit references to it and to the history of representing those levels of reality that lie beneath and beyond the conventional surfaces of things" - Ubuweb

"French filmmaker and artist who has developed a manner of treating filmic material that crosses over traditional boundaries of film genres: short film, experimental cinema and animation. His work lies on the edge between optical and plastic art, in a gap of constant re-invention. Patrick Bokanowski challenges the idea that cinema must, essentiallly, reproduce reality, our everyday thoughts and feelings. His films contradict the photographic objectivity that is firmly tied to the essence of film production the world over. Bokanowski’s experiments attempt to open the art of film up to other possibilities of expression, for example by "warping" his camera lens (he prefers the term "subjective" to "objective" - the French word for "lens"), thus testifying to a purely mental vision, unconcerned with film’s conventional representations, thus affecting and metamorphosing reality, and thereby offering to the viewer of his films new adventures in perception." - Pierre Coulibeuf, Lightcone