Romantic Machine

Bokanowski returns to the complex - and mind-bending - optical array of pinholes, mirrors, prisms, and refractive substrates of his earlier film, La Plage to create the whimsical and playful Au bord du lac. The film is composed of mundane, everyday scenes of recreation and leisure on an idyllic, sunny day at a park that overlooks a lake - rowing a boat, playing a game of volleyball, rollerskating, bicycling, reading a newspaper, sunbathing, riding on horseback, or strolling on the promenade - shot through optical distortions to create fractured and knotted images that resemble embellished, gothic fairytale illustrations or appear to resolve into morphing, geometric patterns of fluid motion. Evoking the vibrant colors and sun-soaked palette of an invigorated Vincent van Gogh in Arles, Bokanowski transforms the quotidian into an infinitely mesmerizing dynamic kaleidoscope of shape-shifting textures and self-reconstituting objects of organic, abstract art.

An experimental music ensemble is recording an album. They want a very specific sound: the sound of thick air. The sound engineer struggles to understand and to find that sound. A tale of sleepless nights and loud music, a noise-injected collage composed of diaristic footage, a found narrative (memories of a popular 60s band), original music and field recordings.

"The Role of Chance" ("La part du hasard") focuses exclusively on drawing and painting techniques used by the painter Henri Dimier. Shot over several weeks in the same artist's studio, the film shows works in their different phases, processes rarely explained or little known. It also addresses many practical issues (choice of paper, pigment grinding, reports drawings, put the tiles, cliches, etc) as well as broader questions of method and inspiration (use of space, the role of contours, power of suggestion perspectives, use of random processes). Patrick Bokanowski sought with this film to restore the spirit of this teaching, showing how to bend a note or sometimes revealing an essential mystery of creation.

The Crystal Text is a fleeting, poetic impression of the the fragmented emotional world of Young Moon's music. Amazingly, all of the visual effects are created within the camera, rather than through digital manipulation. The resulting film explores the rhythms inherent in the combination of music and film, as it evokes both memory and gesture to create an audio and visual dialog with the audience.

The hotel overlooks the city hall. The city hotel returns the glance. Glances bounce off each other, become directions and points headed towards, together, and outwards all just one frame apart in between the hotel and city hall.

A mysterious light appeared in the city and quickly disappeared.

Paleo is a video clip shoot at the famous homonymous music festival in the French canton of Vaud in Switzerland, where many hippie-techno-pagans gather every summer since 1977. The editing style is a tribute to the reworking of psychedelic theories and the New Age proliferation within rave culture in the early 90s from the perspective of the late second decade of the new millennium. In the footage, the ritual ingestion of psychedelics is symbolically replaced by a liberating dance through a powerful fast montage that epitomizes the frenzy of intoxication achieved through psychedelic plants. A revival of a revival of a revival.

A dream where obsession for German as a second language mixes up with an obsession for neatness and cleanliness as a distinctive feature of the national culture in question seen from the perspective of a foreigner. The dream is not a nightmare only because the set it is dreamt into is the seashore of the mare nostrum, where the dreaming subject is perfectly at home. A homeland which she, in turn, in her more secret thus naïf dreams would dream of being cleaner and tidier as in the reality, especially in front of such beauty of nature. As is right and proper.

Two generations dialogue through the images they filmed of their children, a reflection of the emotional bond that arises from their involvement with what was shot.

Organic forms are beating and resorbing, reflections dance to the rhythm of Henk BADINGS 'music, circles of light flash like disturbing eyes, perpetual metamorphoses evoke a great living and throbbing organism.

Relentlessly reworking ‘real’ images, using techniques borrowed from painting and animated film, Patrick Bokanowski is an author of stature, capable of creating an insane and cataclysmic universe of unquestionable beauty.

Reworked and colored images of people playing at the seashore.

Walking towards the fire. In a ceaseless stream of light, people, landscapes and objects lead us to mysterious regions. French filmmaker Patrick Bokanowski’s work is hard to classify - and all the richer for it. Together with his wife Michèle, whose musique concrète compositions form the basis of the sound design, Bokanowski offers a prolonged, dense and visually visceral experience of the kind that is rare in cinema today. Difficult to define and locate, its strangeness is quite unique.

Memories split in the space.

Film directed from the play "Orpheon", directed by François Tanguy, played by the Compagny of Raft.

Experimental film by Patrick Bokanowski.

As the end approaches inexorably, the last humans, living millions of years into the future, send a message to the humanity of the present that is both a plea for help and a warning, but also an epic tale of evolution, decline and hope.

Conceived, drawn and animated live by a team of patients from a psychiatric clinic, this achievement presents, in the eyes of its author, less interest on a purely cinematographic level than on that of human experience. It is the disturbing wordless story of a woman and a man living in a strange setting where objects are endowed with life that they have chosen to tell us through this theater of shadow puppets in cut out figurines. Their characters will know a tragic fate since carried in the air by balloons, they will finally be devoured by a horrible dragon.

Dreamlike sea bathing and horse rides. Colors take the plunge, the horizon blazes, breaking waves pound endlessly. A strange journey through depths of sound and vision.

In order to buy a horse, a man wanders in the bazaars of Thessaly. His journey will take him further than he imagines, as old prophets, forgotten witches and vampire princes will find himself on his way.