Flight memory is a video essay that offers a reflection on false memories. The experience suggests watching the scrolling of film transfers made from the 35mm trailer of Robert Schwentke's film Flightplan. While projecting the idea of a mental dismantling (undergone by the main actress of the film), the video leads the viewer into a game of forgetting or reminiscing of a “déjà vu” film.
Noé Grenier : Born in the Alpes-Maritimes in 1987, I graduated from the École supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Montpellier (2011) as well as from the Fresnoy Studio National des Arts Contemporains (2014-2016).
Since the beginning of my video experiments, I have been developing a personal approach to the moving image. Through a series of works, installations, photographs or films, I reflect on the transformation of images, and thus of the gaze, in the temporality of viewing. My work draws on cinema as the main source of creation. By performing gestures and manipulations on existing images, I propose to study the ubiquitous metamorphosis of consciousness during states of displacement, transport and travel. In the video Play with Time (2011) for example, taking again the cut of the opening of the film Playtime of Jacques Tati, I apply a device of temporal fragmentation on the space of the airport, delaying or projecting in the future protagonists, who are themselves awaiting a departure or an arrival. In the installation Triomphe des pains (2016) produced in second year at the Fresnoy Studio National des Arts Contemporains, I re-stage through a device operating on the light control of LCD screens, a scene from the film Charade by Stanley Donen, in in which the two characters are caught in the turmoil of a metro trip. Finally, in my last film Flight Memory (2018) from film transfers of the 35mm trailer of Robert Schwentke's film Flightplan, we are already in the air, in a plane where the manipulation of memories affects both the actors and the spectators. This search for a relationship between cinematographic movement and human movement, captured in transport machines, has so far sent me back to reflections on the effect of simultaneity, coexistence of images and immediate perception.
My work today extends to questioning the organization of time and movement through the establishment of fictions whose experimental writing aims to introduce a questioning of the memory of places, spaces and times.
These interests which are found in the work carried out with the trio Catharsis Projection (with Gwendal Sartre and Gilles Ribero https://catharsis-projection.com), in Éclipse, une esthetic de la censure (2018) carried out in residence at the School of the Fine Arts of Marseille. From the archives of French film censorship commissions, the film reveals the games of influence, attraction and degradation that revolve around the conception of a work. In Leaning, Leaning (2017) it is the collective appropriation of a gospel song that caught our attention, highlighting the multiplication of interpretations as if to preserve the identity of a timeless and shared choir.
