CONTRAST
an experimental movie by Reine Graves
text by Jacques Henric

A kid toy as a camera,
a journey
back to the origins
of the cinematographic art,
quasi Freudian will of an amnesis.

Contrast means
to be in opposition with,
to contradict,
to contest,
to fight against.

During the seventeenth century contrast meant the difference between tons and colours.
According to Furetière, a well known French art critic, the contrast is “the greatest beauty of a painting”.

Reine Graves’s film (a triptych) unites the ancient and the modern senses of this term. Its form, the technique used (a kid toy as a camera-a journey back to the origins of the cinematographic art - quasi Freudian will of anamnesis) contradicts, contests, fights the invasion, the dictatorship of advertising’s images that enslave today’s movies, videos and television. Using the medium of black and white, giving the light its full power, this film plays on a level of contrast pushed to its ultimate consequences. In doing so, it gives a chance to “the greatest beauty” of something that is no longer banal images but a suite, a succession of true tableaux inside which motion develops rhythmically, musically (held up by Bartok’s composition) a strange choreography.

‘Contrast’ is a work of digging, an almost archaeological excavation. On oneself. On the tragic knot which gives birth to the family nucleus as Aristotle and the ancient Greek dramatist portrayed. On that which solders the human race into a huge and deadly community. Nothing is explicit in this film, everything is suggested by the images and the game of the text in counterpoint.

The memory: at the beginning of the film an old man loses it, or refuses it, or rediscovers it excessively and suffers from it, eventually it kills him.

In the second part an umpteenth family is being built, upon a forbidenness, a taboo, the taboo of incest. There’s a party. What are they celebrating? What is hidden?

The third panel of the triptych is dedicated to art, or the powerful return of the all world memory. A Pierre Weiss sculpture. Vienna, one of the modern arts origins, Freud’s birthplace. Art or the search of the proof, for the absence of proof. Eros presides, Thanatos watches. Contrast’s ultimate.