The Film and Television Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague will welcome Canadian filmmaker Alexandre Larose, active in the contemporary experimental film scene in Montréal, as part of its mentoring programme. He worked with students at FAMU from 31 January to 1 February, 2024.
On Wednesday, January 31 at FAMU, the filmmaker lead his masterclass and on Thursday, February 1 he gave a lecture on the role of technology in the creative process, focusing on the apparatus of the optical printer in experimental film. On Thursday evening at 8:30pm, he personally introduced his films at the National Film Archive's Ponrepo Cinema.
“French-Canadian filmmaker Alexandre Larose merges his technical skills with a singular, intuitive cinematic vision. Through the meticulous practice of in-camera editing, he creates studies in motion. Layering in the depths of time and the depths of celluloid, Larose endows personal memory with a plastic and virtual body. Both living and non-living matter emanate their duration in time through multiple exposures; the passage and condensation of time transform movements into gestures. He practically returns cinema to its contingency of early times, questioning the limits of our vision and perception of time,” writes filmmaker Alexandra Morales in the annotation to the programme of Larose's films
The filmmaker, born in 1978 in Lebel-sur-Quévillon, Québec, belongs to the current generation of Canadian experimental filmmakers. He first earned a BEng in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Sherbrooke (2001), followed by a BA from the Mel Hoppenheim Film School (2006), and then an MA in Studio Arts (Film Production) from Concordia University (2013). His creative practice in the medium of photochemical and opto-mechanical film explores the phenomena of the appearance and representation of moving images, drawing directly on his engineering and artistic handcraft background. Film theorist Éric Thouvenel writes of it:
“Traversed, precisely, by a particular form of porosity with the documentary field, his work constitutes both a sensitive and equipped investigation of the perceptual categories through which we apprehend reality, and a waking reverie on the labyrinths of memory. His career has thus led him to pay ever-greater attention to the forms of imprint elaborated by film, and the very notion of documentation - be it of a place, a situation, an architectural, familial or memorial configuration - is central to it, while remaining fundamentally informed by the technical specificities of the material he employs, whether Super 8 or, more frequently, 16 and 35mm. The function of technique in his work is therefore decisive, and Larose himself readily refers to his films as projects prescribed by the instrument.” (Débordements, 2016)
Photo: Louisa Havránková