experimentalconversations.com wrote:
Like Godard, Francois-Jacques Ossang seems beached by the outgoing tide of that century, creating works variously engaged with sifting and evaluating its legacy. The Festival’s guest of honour, Ossang is a fascinating figure deserving of far wider international recognition than he currently receives. A child of the punk generation, he is also a poet and novelist, as well as lead singer of the band Mesagero Killers Boys. The Different Directions mini-retrospective included one of his three features, Docteur Chance (1997), and three more recent shorts, all projected in 35mm at the Town Hall Theatre. He describes Docteur Chance as a ‘monument’ to the 20th century but, unlike Godard’s Histoire(s) in which the filmmaker presides over a ritual autopsy in a museum, Ossang insists on the necessity of a ‘live’ and thus more vulnerable state to experience the last century’s death-rush. His 20th century is the century of speed, of the machine, of the Futurists, Burroughs, cinema (especially silent cinema) and Rock’n’Roll. Of ‘no future’, where oblivion is precisely that and what is spent is spent. This is the source of his vulnerability when compared to the older Godard, who has entombed himself to examine the leavings of Time from a perspective almost outside its flow, a voice from Beyond whose body becomes the images it has witnessed. Ossang in Docteur Chance still requires a body moving in space for time to run out on, and, more importantly, to experience and even initiate speed. The breathless, fragmented road movie-thriller world of Docteur Chance, Ossang’s only colour film, is a South America of the mind where the viewer always feels a step behind the action. Myriad cultural references come in to play, giving the hero’s flight the scope of a century- Georg Trakl sells potions from his chemical laboratory, William Burrough’s guiding voice issues from aeroplane radios, and the mysterious missing comrade at the end of the quest could only be played by Joe Strummer. It’s as if Ruiz had decided to make a Peckinpah film.

1.16GB | 1h 35mn | 720×432 | avi

https://nitro.download/view/F24583111BEA281/Docteur.Chance.1997.avi https://nitro.download/view/1F3CCBAC7AE6644/Docteur.Chance.1997.srt

Language(s):French, occasional English & Italian
Subtitles:English

The post F.J. Ossang – Docteur Chance (1997) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

9 Fingers opens like in a film noir: at night, in a train station, a man called Magloire runs from a police control. With no luggage and no future. No sooner has he found a huge amount of money than trouble begins. A gang on his heels will soon make him a hostage then an accomplice. It is Kurtz’s gang. After an aborted break-in, they all have to flee aboard a cargo ship with a dangerous volatile freight. Nothing happens as it was supposed to be – poison and madness contaminate everybody. Kurtz’s men seem to be the pawns of a conspiracy led by the mysterious “9 Fingers”…

4.11GB | 1h 38m | 920×1080 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/5073320C323C920/9.Doigts.2017.1080p.MUBI.WEB-DL.AAC2.0.H264-CMYK.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English, Dutch, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish

The post F.J. Ossang – 9 doigts AKA 9 Fingers (2017) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Inspired by Gianfranco Sanguinetti’s On Terrorism and the State. Shots of the orbital road, the Arc de Triomphe and rebellious blindfolded youths in a gunfight.

In-between essay and fiction, La dernière énigme established Ossang’s formal territory: a contemporary mythology. Inspired by the book On Terrorism and the State by Gianfranco Sanguinetti, it evokes visual echoes of political events, where a generation forfeits all revolutionary aspirations due to state terrorism. Shot using two cans of Kodak XX 16mm film.

https://nitro.download/view/1CEAE63631F0371/La.derniere.enigme.1982.DVDRip.XviD.avi
https://nitro.download/view/5FC0E4DD6066447/La.derniere.enigme.1982.DVDRip.XviD.idx
https://nitro.download/view/7CBBAD03A5C0E48/La.derniere.enigme.1982.DVDRip.XviD.sub

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The post F.J. Ossang – La dernière énigme (1982) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
The world after the atomic age. An engineer disappears, together with his consortium (Kryo’Corp) and his discovery: a new energy source powered by the fusion of two primary substances. Ulysses, Kryo’Corp’s heir, organises an expedition to the only place these substances occur.

Quote:
Antonioni meets Rod Serling? Stalker by way of Gilliam? David Lynch’s Star Trek? F.J. Ossang’s sophomore feature, Treasure of the Bitch Islands (1990) is a concoction both familiar and utterly unique. The treasure is oreon, a man-made energy source dreamed up by a recently disappeared engineer. A crew of smartly dressed lowlifes is dispatched to the Bitch Islands, an irradiated archipelago, in search of the tycoon and his golden goose. The islands are incarnate nightmares, unstable and destabilizing, as incomprehensible and intoxicating as the film itself.

Like most great cheapo sci-fi extravaganzas, we hear more than we see. The characters allude to cannibals, human torches and other hellish would-be setpieces, all of which never materialize onscreen. It’s a testament to the power of Ossang and cinematographer Darius Khondji’s images that we don’t regret their absence. With wide lenses warping their searing whites and shimmering grays, Ossang and Khondji present a gorgeous array of expressionist images (silhouettes, fog, extreme closeups) that metastasize in the brain.

The imagery is aided in its disorienting mission by the propulsive drone of Ossang’s own industrial score, credited to Messageros Killers Boy, and his metal-poetic dialogue along the lines of “love demands the love one’s total destruction once it is threatened by its own impotence.” At every turn we are deprived of proper footing, condemned to wander through the haze like the film’s addled characters. Unlike these doomed figures, we’re able to enjoy the trip.

+ Interview with F.J. Ossang

1.64GB | 1h 53m | 696×334 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/DF3F904CA71203C/Le.Tresor.des.Iles.Chiennes.1990.x264.AC3.DVDRip-JB666.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/A112B4FF465C528/Interview_with_film_director_F.J._Ossang-interview.mkv

Language(s):French,English
Subtitles:English

The post F.J. Ossang – Le Trésor des Iles Chiennes AKA Land of the Dead [+Extra] (1990) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

A dirty deal between cowboys. The fight between the Texan Benz, head of a gang of assassins, and Captain Mort, his right-hand man.

La Zone – the poor, dangerous quarters of Paris (George Lacombe, 1928); the administrative zone where Orpheus looks for his lost Eurydice (Jean Cocteau, 1950); Interzone – the working title for Naked Lunch (W.S. Burroughs, 1959). In 1983, Ossang created a synthesis of all these territories of unrest under a banner of dead colours.

Written & directed by
F.J. Ossang

Release Date
1983

291MB | 22:16.240 | 640*464 | avi

https://nitro.download/view/D5D022704662F3B/Zona.Inquinata.1983.DVDRip.XviD.avi
https://nitro.download/view/DFED0907408E3AD/Zona.Inquinata.1983.DVDRip.XviD.idx
https://nitro.download/view/C592854D7E55157/Zona.Inquinata.1983.DVDRip.XviD.sub

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English (idx/sub)

The post F.J. Ossang – Zona Inquinata ou La vie n’est plus qu’une sale histoire de cowboys (1983) first appeared on Cinema of the World.