French philosopher Gilles Deleuze recognised „a new type of actor” in the films of the Nouvelle Vague: professional non-professionals who do not just recite dialogue but act as a medium for our perception. Two of them were uppermost in his mind: Jean-Pierre Léaud and her, Bulle Ogier. The French performer has appeared in nearly 100 films over a period of more than 50 years. However, the masterpieces she was involved in were often not appreciated as such by her contemporaries but, as critic Philippe Azoury puts it, regarded as child’s play.
This is what makes this cinephile biogram, which, apart from a few conversations, consists mainly of archive material and a wealth of intelligently selected and edited film clips, so special: Eugénie Grandval’s portrait recalls a time when cinema was bursting its bonds and anything seemed possible. Playing parts that were never repeated and yet followed an astonishingly consistent arc, Bulle Ogier not only became an icon of that period but something of a co-author of the directors she worked with, whether they were called Barbet Schroeder, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Marguerite Duras or Jacques Rivette. Rarely has a film about film sparked such an appetite for rediscovery.

Wang Xilin does not enter the stage in a suite, as the title might suggest, but completely naked. He stretches and bends, appears to familiarise himself with his surroundings, does some vocal exercises, sits down at the piano. Wang Xilin is one of China’s most important composers of contemporary music, having written his first symphonies in his youth. Wang Bing gives the 86-year-old more than a little space. For his portrait, he presents him with the entire Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris.

This is where Wang Xilin reviews his life of torture and oppression, recapitulates the tribulations in communist China, reports knocked-out teeth and nightmares, suicides among intellectuals. His testimony is frequently underlaid, sometimes even drowned out by grandiose musical arrangements. When an orchestra thunders from offscreen, Wang Xilin’s body rears up – “Man in Black” is also an exorcistic oral history. The composer turns himself into his own instrument, into the medium of a violent epoch, sharing his emotions literally unveiled.

If there is one person Matthew Lancit can’t get out of his mind, it is his uncle Harvey. Dark rings around his eyes, pale, blind, his legs amputated. Like Harvey, the filmmaker also suffers from diabetes. He has the disease under control, but one question is always nagging at him: How much longer? His long-term (self-)observation reliably revolves around fears of infirmity and mutilation. He translates the feared body horror into film, stages himself as a zombie, vampire, a desolate figure. Lancit playfully anticipates his potential decline, serving up a whole arsenal of effects which – as video recordings prove – go back to his youth. It is not for nothing that the “dead” in the title is also reminiscent of “dad.” Because “Play Dead!” also negotiates his own role as a father.

Lancit deeply involves his family in his fantasies, letting them become demons and lurch through the living room together. The documentation of his own diabetes also allows us a look at a modern Paris family life with two small children and a partner who usually plays along sympathetically with her husband’s carryings-on. Lancit’s approach deliberately transgresses borders, opens body, soul and front door. The result is a humorous and occasionally disturbing self-testimony.

As a philosopher, Frenchman Bruno Latour (1947–2022) opened not only rooms of reflection but whole houses. An anthropologist and sociologist, he became an internationally renowned advocate for shifting paradigms, with the aim of re-defining the place of the human individual in the cycle of nature. Latour coined the term “ecological class,” to be created on planet earth to become aware of fundamental options for action in crises. But: How do we react to his questions, visions, and concepts in our daily life, far removed from science and philosophy? Do they reach us? Do they spark debates when we encounter them?
Raphaël Girardot and Vincent Gaullier found individuals in France, Belgium and Senegal who want to go their own way in observing, describing and changing conditions, or already do so in communities – on fields and in forests, fishing or protesting, as autonomous beings or in familiar structures. The directors confront some of them with Latour’s writings, trigger thoughts and conversations and let Bruno Latour himself guide us through the episodes in short interview sequences from the internet. Increasingly marked by his cancer, he shows himself to be a precise analyst with verve, humour, and clear statements.

Narimane Mari dedicates a touching portrait that tells of parting to her now deceased lover, the artist Michel Haas. She captures first and foremost the small, everyday moments – street scenes, working at the studio, watching films together, reading to each other in bed. The absence of a traditional narration, long shots and intense conversations invite us to think about our own relationship with temporality.

A recurring potpourri of poems, prose and music by Nâzım Hikmet, Stéphane Mallarmé through to Sun Ra gives the film its very own leisurely rhythm. The scenes at the studio are carried by this mood, too. As with Jackson Pollock, the art is created mostly on the floor. But Michel Haas works with ink, large-format paper sheets and hot water instead of canvas and thinned paint. Humming happily, he hits the soaked paper with his bare hands until edges, creases and folds form. The abstract outlines and flat shapes are recognisable as figures only when viewed from a distance: Often, they are intertwined couples. A contemplative tribute to love.

The kidnapping and murder of the politician Aldo Moro; four slashed tyres that were to save a florist’s life; the lost soundtrack to Antonioni’s film “Zabriskie Point”; the meeting of two avant-garde composers; archive material and found footage – these are the elements of this “freely composed” film that is imbued with the city of Rome and juxtaposes the human urge for constant rebellion and the thesis of the end of history.

For the US electronic composer Alvin Curran, whose intellectual and artistic world are at the centre of Éric Baudelaire’s exceptionally rich collage, music is a vehicle that carries us to places we have never travelled before. In Rome, where Curran settled in the 1960s, he met his then considerably more experienced professional colleague Franco Evangelisti, who shocked him with the question: “Don’t you know that there’s no more music to write?” Baudelaire’s congenial montage of image and sound fragments suggests that Curran’s solo work – as well as his collaboration with the pioneering collective “Musica Elettronica Viva” – is the answer to Evangelisti’s question: We have to keep reassembling the world.