Zone blanche (2014), by Gaëlle Cintré, 22 minutes

In presence of the artiste

Mixing the registers of documentary and fiction, Gaëlle Cintré’s video work finds its inspiration in anecdotes from daily life and science fiction stories. Her film Zone Blanche (White Zone) takes the opposite view of Caméra(Auto)Contrôle, sketching out a negative form of technological control that affects bodies to the point of expelling them from the contemporary technocosm. She met four women who suffer from acute artificial electromagnetic field intolerance syndrome (SICEM in French), which is caused by mobile phones and WiFi. These electro-hypersensitive women survive by living in the mountains, their daily lives wavering between a return to a primitive lifestyle and post-apocalyptic science fiction. Because they can no longer tolerate being near electric currents, or even batteries, the filmmaker had to approach them with a mechanical camera.

Suivi de

Erkennen und Verfolgen (War at a distance) (2003), de Harun Farocki, 58 minutes

Harun Farocki, who died two years ago, was a filmmaker, critic, publisher, theoretician, teacher, and curator who trained a lucid and constantly fresh eye on our relation to images and their nature. From his début in 1966, he shot over a hundred, usually short and mediumlength films, mainly essays. His resolutely political body of work offers a grid for interpreting the evolution of regimes of images over the last 40 years, and especially the rise of systems of
control.
In Erkennen und Verfolgen (literally, “recognize and track”—the principles of tracking), he sets out to decrypt the increasingly widespread use of on-board cameras on missiles and bombs during the Gulf War. He also emphasizes the loss of reality in these images, which seem to come right out of a video game