Guest: Philippe Garrel - La Concentration (35mm)

We are honored to welcome the French filmmaker Philippe Garrel (1948) to Art Cinema OFFoff! He rarely travels anymore to present his films, but wants to make an exception for us.

The film we are showing, La Concentration, has been seldomly screened since its release in 1968, only on rare occasions as part of major retrospectives in New York or Paris. Last December, a remastered HD version of the film was made. We will be projecting the 35mm print from the Cinémathèque française.

For the 2021 edition of our recurring Night of Experimental Film, we received permission to screen Athanor (1972) and Le Berceau de cristal (1976). For the latter film, Garrel actually came to Ghent in ​’76 – possibly his last visit – then accompanied by his lover, the actress and singer Nico. Back in 2012, we showed La Cicatrice intérieure (1972), also part of the triptych dedicated to her. It is a pleasure to now welcome Philippe Garrel in person.

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Philippe Garrel is a key figure of the French post-Nouvelle Vague cinema. His experimental early works were made within the orbit of the dandy-like Zanzibar group, an informal artistic collective, and anticipated both the fury and the failure of May ​’68. In 1969, he met Nico, the former model, muse to Warhol, and Velvet Underground singer, who acted in seven of his films, and continues to haunt them to this day. Following Le Révélateur (1968) – which Film Fest Gent and VIDEODROOM recently showed with a new live score – Garrel’s works from the 70s were often silent, or shot on leftover film material. After 1979, his work became more narrative. Life and art are entirely inseparable for Garrel, who continually makes recourse to episodes from his own biography: the love, or rather dialectic between man and woman, relationship crises, separation and new love(s), lack and loss, loneliness, the connections between politics and emotions, the influence of drugs, the motif of suicide, art as a form of survival, the relationship to his father – the actor Maurice Garrel – and his children – Louis and Esther Garrel – who were six and ten when they first appeared in his films Les Baisers de secours (1989) and Sauvage Innocence (2001), and continue to do so up until their father’s latest film, Le Grand Chariot (2023).