Marie Losier's Masterclass

HEAR THE PODCAST OF THE MASTERCLASS

Marie Losier in a talk with Delphine Jeanneret at the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur 2021 - edited version. Editing: Ruth Baettig – In collaboration with the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur

She was there, she met them, she liked them, they liked her, she made a portrait of them. This has been Marie Losier’s main cinematic “drive” – together with a Bolex she got as a present. “There” is New York, “them” are exceptional personalities devoting their lives to art. Outsiders – one could say – whereas this expression could equally apply now, in a society saturated by the politically correct, and probably not in the “normal” underground scene of the Nineties, be it in New York or Berlin.

Through this specific and personal casting, the documentary joins the fiction, insofar as Losier’s characters are charged with fiction, imagination, art. Her formal choices in framing and editing continue and develop the fantasy of their subjects. Their personality becomes a collaged filmic landscape. Hermeneutics becomes physical, embodied, and the regressive movement of documentary becomes “progressive”.

Marie Losier plays with film (her camera being her favourite toy), a sort of inevitable membrane of communication with the world. In this way, when we look at her films, we are not only in front of moving images, we are between them and her camera. In a way, we are there.

Giuseppe Di Salvatore