IL SE PEUT QUE LA BEAUTé AIT RENFORCé NOTRE RéSOLUTION - MASAO ADACHI
Philippe Grandrieux is one of that rare breed of directors who consistently strive for the impossible. One of the few others is called Masao Adachi, and with him in front of the camera, Grandrieux redefines the possibilities of the portrait film. Adachi decided to become a filmmaker after reading…

PAREIDOLIA
''Pareidolia' has as its narrative a fictional take on the situation leading up to the creation of the book 'Zen in the Art of Archery', by Eugen Herrigel. A popular book set in Japan in the 1930s that created a cult following in Europe during the post-war years. The author's interpretation of Zen…

""Pareidolia" has as its narrative a fictional take on the situation leading up to the creation of the book "Zen in the Art of Archery", by Eugen Herrigel. A popular book set in Japan in the 1930s that created a cult following in Europe during the post-war years. The author's interpretation of Zen centres around an event he observed while living in japan, the shooting of two arrows in a darkened hall by his eccentric archery master, Awa Kenzo. In Herrigel's book the master then exclaimed; "It, the Divine, has shot!" In the book "Shots in the Dark", Yamada Shoji questions Herrigal's account, believing that his conviction was formed by a linguistic misunderstanding between the German professor and the Japanese master, due to the absence of the translator. "Pareidolia" is told from the fictional point of view of the translator and his alter-ego, a bird, and their musings over hunting versus Zen archery and the creation of the popular book. When asked to retranslate the book into Japanese, his character questions subjectivity, translation, and belief. The title points to the need for caution where stories are involved: Pareidolia refers to the tendency of human perception to discover meaningful pictures in random structures. The film's visuals are shot inside a model set of a university lecture theatre, an archery hall and various traditional Japanese interiors, alternated by animatronic birds drinking from dripping plants. The sound track was composed by Daniel Pemberton using various instruments alongside a taishogoto." (Saskia Olde Wolbers)

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Philippe Grandrieux is one of that rare breed of directors who consistently strive for the impossible. One of the few others is called Masao Adachi, and with him in front of the camera, Grandrieux redefines the possibilities of the portrait film. Adachi decided to become a filmmaker after reading André Breton's surrealist manifesto. But if the struggle for freedom is the defining project of surrealism, the 71-year-old Japanese avant-garde director is preoccupied just as much by the struggle itself as he is by the strenuously won freedom. Adachi is one of the most radically political, uncompromising and headstrong filmmakers of his generation. But even if one has not already had the chance to see one of his rarely screened films, there are nonetheless all sorts of reasons for spending an evening in his company. Grandrieux, who was an Artist in Focus at CPH:DOX 2009, has produced a congenial portrait which is more about making radical choices, and about thinking in and not least acting through images. Grandrieux's typically pitch-black and atmospheric pictorial universe transforms the cinema into a psychological "dark room" that overcomes the limitations of the medium to expand the spectator's range of experience. "Revolution is also an image. The question is, how one turns that image into reality." (Masao Adachi)

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