Le Passeur immobile, which covers the year 1987, is a Booklet filmed stuck between The Days and the Nights (1986) and The Artifice and the Fake (1988). These Notebooks have been punctuating my activity as a filmmaker for about fifteen years. They are like a life parallel to my other films and film series (Cinema, Group Portrait, Read, etc.). They are also like a letter to the spectators.
I give a methodical account of my film work: the creation of new series (Lire, Trio, Avec Mariola), the shooting of a new feature film (Amours décolorées which will take ten years to edit) with Mariola San Martin.
Gérard Courant's "Filmed Diary" of December 14, 2011, produced in Dubai (United Arab Emirates). Between December 7 and 15, 2011, Gérard Courant was invited by the Dubai International Film Festival, in the United Arab Emirates. It was an opportunity for him to film many "Cinematons" of personalities from the Arab world and to continue his "Film Notebooks" from which he brought back 7 episodes.
“Les Malheurs de Marc Allégret” shows the ravages of time on the rushes of the unfinished film “Les Corsaires” which Marc Allégret began filming in 1940 and which was interrupted by the Second World War. By isolating and slowing down the most damaged parts of the French filmmaker's film rushes, I managed to create an object with abstract shapes and, insidiously, give another life to a major artistic work. - Gérard Courant
Every year since 1980, I have filmed the Good Friday ceremony reconstructing the Passion of Christ in Burzet, a remote village in the Ardèche area, where for seven hundred years, the local people have dressed up to celebrate and perpetuate this religious rite. (Gérard Courant)
BB X 20 is the compression of 20 films starring Brigitte Bardot, released between 1952 and 1970. Every film is reduced to 25 times the original length, resulting in approximately 4 minutes. BB X 20 is an absolutely complete compression: this anthology devoted to Brigitte Bardot doesn’t miss a single shot of the original films ! The work, presented in chronological order beginning with 1952, the year she first appeared on screen, slowly reveal the creation and transformation of Brigitte Bardot into an icon.
On 6 December 2013, a public exhibition dedicated to her memory, Bernadette Lafont l'exposition hommage, was held in Paris. Actors Stéphane Audran, Guillaume Gouix and Alexandra Stewart read some extracts of Bernard Bastide's new biography Bernadette Lafont, une vie de cinéma, including some original letters written by Bernadette. The event was filmed by Gérard Courant and aired as an episode of Carnets filmés, In Memoriam Bernadette Lafont.
"Les Malheurs d'Yvan Noé" shows the ravages of time on the film A Death Without Importance that Yvan Noé shot in 1948. By isolating and slowing down the most damaged parts of the French filmmaker's film, I managed to create a object with abstract shapes and, insidiously, to give another life to an artistic work. - Gérard Courant
Courant registered Garrel’s dialogues in order to produce his first urgent film, the first of his essays inquiring the state of current cinema. As a synthesis for the 20th century, Garrel invoked his relationship with Freud, Henri Langlois, Orson Welles, Marx, The Rolling Stones, Godard, Warhol, Picasso and Bergman and draw a territory in that different kind of cinema also inhabited by Courant’s art. Four years later –as a sequel, and a first example of Courant’s series– there was another meeting with Garrel, where again the filmmaker adds names related to his sensitivity, such as Murnau, Von Stroheim, the Lumière brothers, Abel Gance, Polanski, Rivette; the writers André Breton and Gabriele d’Annunzio; and the actresses Anna Karina, Nico, Zouzou and Maria Schneider –three stars of his films. (Diego Trerotola)
A simple, modest and faithful record of some moments at the Lucca Film Festival in October 2010, with songs and speeches by Abel Ferrara: trace of the co-presence of two of the greatest contemporary filmmakers, dissident and true sons of Cesare Zavattini’s revolutionary spirit.
On the occasion of the 7th meetings of Digne, Pour un autre cinéma, organized by Pierre Queyrel and which presented a retrospective of Philippe Garrel's cinematographic work, this film is the sound recording of the discussion that the filmmaker made with the audience after the screening of his films Marie pour mémoire, Athanor, Voyage au jardin des morts and Le Bleu des origines.
