reconstructed cinema 1

"The work of Nicolas Provost walks the fine line between dualities, balancing fiction and fine arts, the grotesque and the moving, the beautiful and the cruel. His phantasmagorias provoke both recognition and alienation and succeed in pulling audience expectations into an unraveling game of mystery and abstraction. In some videos, filmic memory is stimulated through the use of short fragments from classic films by Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, Alain Resnais or Russ Meyers, but Provost is as likely to utilize obscure B-films, contemporary cinema or thematic platitudes. Time and form are manipulated, cinematographic and narrative language is analyzed, accents are shifted and new stories are told. The extraordinary is elucidated in order to reveal the global. In addition to the use of film and visual language, sound is a constant factor in Provost's body of work, as a rhythmical spine or an emotional guideline."

"My field of interest is to analyze and question the phenomenon of cinema, its various elements, its influence and conventional rules. My work is a reflection on the grammar of cinema and the relation between visual art and the cinematic experience. That said, it's all about love."

—Nicolas Provost


Pommes d'amour

DVD, BetaSP, DVD, b/w, 5’, 2001
Prod: Nicolas Provost, Music: Nicolas Provost



A serie of three mirror-image films using filmsamples from ‘Hiroshima mon amour’ by A. Resnais, and ‘Summer Interlude’ by I. Bergman to evoke a surreal, alienating and bizarre-nostalgic mood in 3 acts.
The filmmaterial is reedited, restructured and mirrored in the middle of the image, creating new pulsing forms that change the meaning in relation to the image. The original soundtrack is replaced with new composed music, the dialogues are rewritten and lip sincked by computer generated voices.
Using this method, a strong audiovisual atmosfere was caused and, with causious redirection of the original visuals, sound and script, developped into a very direct poetic language.
Pommes d´amour reflects upon love, wether it is about adoration, narcissism, sexuality, seperation or sorrow.