Experimenting with genre

Commercial and avant-garde cinema tend to be presented as opposites, but there are inevitably points of contact between the two. With this programme of unusual genre films (science-fiction, horror, western and detective), we see how the early avant-garde filmmakers were able to use the investigations of scientific figures or detectives as an intermediary for their own formal research. We also see, in the practices of found footage and the integration of other audiovisual languages (video games and television), two opposing treatments of popular culture: Zulueta’s fetishist fascination and Baldwin’s iconographic deconstruction.

La folie du Docteur Tube, Abel Gance, 1915, 10 min; Frank Stein, Iván Zulueta, 1972, 16 mm, 3 min; Wild Gunman, Craig Baldwin, 1978, 16 mm, 20 min; Histoire de détective, Charles Dekeukeleire, 1929, 35 mm, silent, 50 min.