Artefact
2011
hD film transferred to 35 mm, continuous, sound
GAILLARD's film "Artefact", shot and edited with a smartphone, atmospherically traces the saga of ancient Babylon and tracks down the scenes of today's war-ravaged Iraq. Between the damaged surfaces of Babylonian religious sites and palaces and museums, emerge desert scenes and scrap yards as if out of nowhere. From time to time the viewer sees soldiers aiming green laser beams like weapons at buildings. The more often the film loop of the worn-out refrain of David GRAY's song "Babylon" is played, the more it fades, until finally it fades out completely.
Cities of Gold and Mirrors
2009
16 mm and 16 mm film transferred to dvd
Cities of Gold and Mirrors , shot in 16mm in Quintana Roo, is a film consisting of five scenes planned to occur principally in and around the city of Cancún, which was founded in 1970. There, a group of springbreakers; a hotel with dolphins in its pool; a member of the Bloods dancing atop a Mayan archaeological site called El Rey; the demolition of a mirrored building; and the interior of the night club Cocobongo appear one after the other, set to a particular looped recording: Le feu de St. Elme, by Haïm Saban and Shuki Levy. This music is part of the soundtrack to an animated series about Spanish conquistadors, Mysterious Cities of Gold (1982). In the cartoon, synthesizers created a sensation of suspense, incredible mysticism, and they recurred every time Esteban -- the show's diminutive protagonist -- was about to discover some new marvel contact that French children from his generation had with pre-Columbian cultures, and it has remained strongly fixed in his memory.
Color Like No Other
2007
dvd
On January 21, 2007, the multi-storey high rise in Queen's Court, Toryglen was finally demolished. The building had served as part of Sony's multimillion pound advertising campaign for the high definition Bravia LCD TV, for which it was blasted with thousands of gallons of paint, and then abandoned like a festooned ruin. The film obliquely chronicles the building's demolition, beginning with a static view of the rubble and then moving to tranquil establishing shots of the tower prior to its fall. The shots give no indication of the imminent explosion, save for several birds that, sensing the vibrations, take flight from the building. This self-conscious torpor contrasts with the orgiastic Sony campaign, highlighting an appetite for the spectacular – in demolition as much as in 20th century painting. The building's former technicolor instrumentalization is countered by what remains: bleak ruins captured with GAILLARD's funereal restraint. A fraction of a second reveals the first black plumes of the demolition before the video abruptly cuts, like an erasure of both the ruin and any monumental end to it.
Crazy Horse
2008
dvd
Performance by Koudlam at Skulpturenpark on Cyprien Gaillard's "Crazy Horse" BB5, 5th Berlin Biennale, Berlin, opening night Cyprien Gaillard's film "Crazy Horse" is a tribute to the ongoing sculpture of Crazy Horse in the Black Hills of South Dakota. In 1948 the sculptor Korczak Ziólkowski (1908–82), commissioned by the Sioux, began a sculpture to honor the Lakota leader Crazy Horse and Mother Nature. This monument, which will take approximately another eighty years to complete, will then be the biggest sculpture in the world. The dynamite used by builders when carving the figure into the mountains of the Black Hills has wreaked destruction and chaos in the national park. Composer and longtime collaborator of Gaillard, Koudlam, composed the music to the film and accompanied the outdoor premiere with a live performance.
Desniansky Raion
2007
video
Alternating between order and chaos, the video "Desniansky Raion" (2007, 29 min.) explores the notion of entropy as developped by Land Art major artist Robert SMITHSON. After a static introduction shot on a building from the 1970s, a monumental triumphal arch marking the entrance of Belgrade, the video unwinds its three sequences, without visible narrative link, to the electro-lyrical music of composer KOUDLAM: first a pitched battle between two hooligan gangs on a car park in the suburbs of Saint-Petersburg; then a grandiose show of lights, lasers and fireworks on the facade of a housing block in the suburbs of Paris, before it collapses; finally, a precariousi flightover a multitude of grey towers rising into a snowy and melancholic landscape on the outskirts of Kiev, where from eventually emerges a perfect circular organisation, recalling the megalithic site of Stonehenge, in England.
Pruitt-Igoe Falls
2009
dvd
The video 'Pruitt-Igoe Falls' takes its title from Pruitt-Igoe, a large urban housing project built in the 1950s in Saint Louis, United States; quickly facing decay, its demolition by implosion started in 1972, 18 years only after construction, and was the first of this kind on such a scale. Designed by American architect Minoru YAMASKI, also responsible for the World Trade Center twin towers, Pruitt-Igoe has become an emblematic icon often evoked by all sides in public housing policy debate, and its destruction was claimed by Postmodern architectural theorician Charles JENCKS to mark 'the day Modern architecture died'. Under these auspices, Cyprien GAILLARD's video consists of two static and silent shots, linked through a subtle crossfade plan. The first part captures the demolition, at night, of a building in Sighthill housing estate in Glasgow. A city favoured by the artist, the capital of Scotland has the highest number of high-rise housing projects in the United Kingdom, some built in the middle of ancient cemeteries and many now bound to be demolished as part of a large urban rehabilitation plan. The video starts with the striking and fraught with meaning vision of a concrete monolith rising from tombstones, under a powerful lighting that makes the whole scene look like a cinema set. When the grey block implodes and collapses, a thick cloud of dust rises slowly to the foreground and eventually covers the audience and the lights, plunging the image in the dark, out of which only emerge shadows of tombs and vegetation. A faint light appears in the center of this nocturnal romantic vision, before intensifying and outshining what remained of the first scene: the second shot is a sight of Niagara Falls when they 'light up' at night, illuminated by spotlights that transform them into a dreamy show with changing vivid colors. The falls are filmed from the United States, the 'cheap seats' for those who cannot afford to go to Canada, where the view is the most spectacular, in the same way that the inhabitants of the Glasgow building, moved out with the promise of a better future, can only watch the spectacle of their former home being demolished. As the foam of the second act formally echoes the cloud of dust of the first, Cyprien GAILLARD brings together the majestic falls, a natural phenomenon turned into an amusement park, and the fall of an architecture, also transformed into a show.
Real Remnants of Fictive Wars I
2003
35 mm film and 35 mm film transferred to dvd
The project 'Real Remnants of Fictive Wars', initially defined as a work of Land Art, is composed of five 35mm films and a dvd. In each film, thick white smoke emitted from industrial fire extinguishers subsumes locations, from urban zones to urban outskirts to countrysides, all selected by the artist for his creations. The films, often shot from a fixed point, seem to pay homage to romantic painting, while introducing the notion of vandalism that is dear to Cyprien GAILLARD.
Real Remnants of Fictive Wars II
2004
35 mm film and 35 mm film transferred to dvd
Shot in 35 mm, 'RROFW II' presents a view of a tunnel disappearing into thick white smoke which invades the scene before withdrawing very slowly. The video seems to pay homage to the impressionist painting of MONET, TURNER or WHISTLER. The series 'Real Remanants of Fictive Wars' is composed of 5 films shot in 35mm, defined by Cyprien GAILLARD as Land Art works. In each film, a thick white smoke emitted from fire extinguishers overwhelms the location, from urban centers to urban outskirts to natural landscapes, all carefully chosen by the artist for his actions.
Real Remnants of Fictive Wars III
2004
35 mm film and 35 mm film transferred to dvd
The project 'Real Remnants of Fictive Wars', initially defined as a work of Land Art, is composed of five 35mm films and a dvd. In each film, thick white smoke emitted from industrial fire extinguishers subsumes locations, from urban zones to urban outskirts to countrysides, all selected by the artist for his creations. The films, often shot from a fixed point, seem to pay homage to romantic painting, while introducing the notion of vandalism that is dear to Cyprien GAILLARD.
Real Remnants of Fictive Wars IV
2004
35 mm film and 35 mm film transferred to dvd
Filmed in the Vietnamese jungle, 'RRoFW IV' is a series of five films documenting Cyprien GAILLARD's land art works. Using fire extinguishers, the artist creates clouds of smoke that gradually invade the camera frame and then disappear, absorbed by the lush Vietnamese vegetation. The 35mm camera gives the film a narrative quality, playing furthermore off the aesthetic of Vietnam War films.
Real Remnants of Fictive Wars V
2004
35 mm film and 35 mm film transferred to dvd
'A grandiose, clanking cinema projector noisily belts out a grainy, 35mm-film of a forest beyond the crumbling balustrade of an old French château. As if in slow motion, a billowing cloud of white smoke erupts from the central tree, infecting its branches with fungal-like spores. The secret behind Cyprien GAILLARD's ‘Real Remnants of Fictive Wars' involves some carefully harnessed tree climbers handling spewing fire extinguishers from within the foliage – anecdotal stuff perhaps – but vital to the understanding of a series of essentially vandalistic, performative endeavours. This virulent act of plein air graffiti seems all the more quaint for its bourgeois setting and is somehow muted by its association with a bygone era of high classicism.' Ossian Ward
The Lake Arches
2007
dvd
Cyprien GAILLARD's 'The Lake Arches' is a 'portrait with ruins' – a film that narrates a violent collision with a shallow promise. It is also an ambiguous clip of teenage folly, an incisive architectural purview, and an allegory for the painful and perhaps pathetic failure of postmodernism's liberating force. Two young men stand the banks of a man-made lake, preparing to dive. Their carefree plunge ends abruptly, however, when one of them strike bottom, and emerges bleeding profusely. The camera follows the boy as he stagger toward shore, revealing in the distance the postmodern architecture of Ricardo BOFILL. 'The Lake Arches', which once embodied the heterogeneity of the postmodern ethos, now extend across the lake like a water-locked dungeon. The young man, like the Arches, gradually recovers from an act whose recklessness could only be willful, his face now hardened and raw. The film seems to cast just as hard a gaze on the boys and their surroundings, reflecting not a loss of innocence but the exposure of folly. Then, as if staggering under the weight of its own postmodern plurality of narratives – the boys', the buildings', postmodern subjectivity's - the film concludes suddenly on the enigmatic face of one of the young men, itself an accusatory ruin framed by 'The Lake Arches'.
