Franck Oger

Quote:
Ombres chinoises was produced for the French TV magazine Juste une Image, a monthly show which in its almost three years of production cataloged all kinds of visual experimentations: from Muybridge to the latest computer animation of the New York Institute of Technology. I.N.A. asked for Ruiz’s participation for the April 1982 show. He decided to produce Ombres Chinoises (probably a project that was wandering in his mind long before), a catalog of dramatic situations acted out by Chinese shadows with voice-over narrations (depositio: actually, as Torrent notes below, these are only voiceovers in the technical sense. The “tragic situations” are represented through shadow, puppetry, and dialog not narration). Nothing comes closer to the Ruizian aesthetics. After the first dramatic situation, titled “enigma,” a panel reads:Read More »

From Jordi Torrent’s program notes for “Raúl Ruiz: works for and about French TV,” at Exit Art (Nov 1987):

LA PRESENCE REELLE works through four axes of plot which are intercut throughout the film:
1. Adam Shaft, an out-of-work actor who recently worked on an interactive video disk documentary about the Avignon Theatre Festival, and who is now in a studio watching the program with the help of a computer specialist. Through conversations between Shaft and the computer specialist we find out that only 10% of time-space images in the video disk have been recorded from actual footage and the rest of the disk has been created by the computer using the ‘real presence’ of living beings. At one point Shaft complains because in the video disk his images are saying things that he never said. The computer specialist explains to him that his words have been used to create an entity that thinks and talks by itself, but that will not necessarily say things that Shaft would have thought or said.Read More »