In Retour d’un repère, the procedure of separating and extracting certain aspects of a scene by adjusting the focus of a series of frames in succession according to various organisational patterns, is developed in a particular way. While the filmic operations are structured in relation to a limited space (a branch over a duck pond), the filmic process rests on a visual transformation of a ‘pantoun’, a verse form borrowed from literary rhetorics, which characteristically transforms itself gradually and continuously in a precise manner.

ELLIPTIC is a filmwork that considers an image as reflecting light. It looks at how brightly a beam of light is deflected as it hits an edge and transforms the image as it enters a lens. A delicately slow focus shift carries this movement along the cone of the visual field into a certain depth, and back again.

In ELLIPTIC, it is the focus puller who deepens the image, manipulates it, determines the action, sets the rhythm and captures surprises. As if it were effectively possible for a camera and moving image to dig into the depths of a piece of reality. As if the medium of film could be a tool to uncover a piece of reality in order to analyse it and find meaning for it. The picture frame is a circle, a hole through which the film explores the digging into an image. The movement of focus through the layers of depth of field changes this cropped frame into a spherical sphere, a volume in which details of objects and nature can find a delineated place, before they disappear again into the blur.

The soundtrack was provided image by image by composer Marie-Cécile Reber. This dialogue between image and sound began with the question of how daylight itself, as a wave or as energy of particles, might sound and become audible in its transitions.  The result is an audio-visual essay, in which listening enhances looking. And vice versa. The title ELLIPTIC, elliptical, refers to the circular frame, and at the same time takes on the meaning of enigmatic, shapeless, vaguely zigzagging, eccentric, variable, indirect, indeterminate, and therefore perhaps intriguing.