Bazin's Film

The faster pace of life in modern society has among other things led to an increase in the prevalence of panic attacks and anxiety disorders. A composition of details torn from context, accompanied by commentary from victims of panic attacks demonstrates the various ways in which they are manifested and draws unsettling conclusions.

An essay study on the possibilities of combining sports and film. Using traditional French film theory and philosophy, the director analyzes the sports performances of American tennis legend John McEnroe captured on 16mm film. The film offers a contemplation on the relationship between duration (durée), the passage of time, and motion.  

A fantastic epic. A nationalist construct. Ideal for taking a selfie. A bunch of paint on a canvas that belongs on the junk heap. Anachronism. A transcendental experience. Working with the playfulness of the cinematic medium, the filmmaker takes us on a tour of the serious world of art, and gives voice to a theorist, an art restorer, a philosopher and a Japanese fan of Mucha.

A mixture of documentary and live action film, The Bit Player is a multilayered portrait of Claude Shannon, the man who invented the word “bit” to describe a unit of information and whose scientific work laid the foundations for IT and artificial intelligence. Through interviews with members of the scientific community, archival footage, and reenactments, the film presents the life and professional story of this forgotten genius who, in addition to his groundbreaking discoveries, also produced numerous strange and useless inventions and enjoyed juggling and cheating at games of chance. The film shows Shannon’s theories and technical ideas using animations easily understood by everyone. "Claude Shannon should be a model for everyone in any creative field. He never lost his child-like curiosity. Sometimes it revolutionized the world; sometimes it made a flaming trumpet." M. Levinson

Every day, Vandana Verma travels across the face of Mars, taking pictures of its surface – all the while never leaving a NASA laboratory in Pasadena, California, from where she controls the Curiosity rover. This engrossing essayistic documentary joins her and other experts in space research in meditating over images of a planet located tens of millions of kilometers from Earth. Mars thus becomes the ideal place for studying our paradoxical relationship to photographs and for contemplating whether images from space (or also from various places on our planet) present us with reality or whether they actually create an alternate reality that we should approach far more cautiously. “Martian imagery reveal as much about our relationship to images as they tell us about Mars itself. This film aims to make the spectral quality of. an image materialize in front of us.” M. Långström

Today, thousands of children are born thanks to the involvement of third parties in laboratories. This documentary analysis tracks the motivation of clients who use reproduction clinics, the ambitions of doctors, and the unsaturated market for assisted conception methods. One question remains hanging over the open topics: Where does the reproductive freedom of an individual end?

During Young’s interference experiment, electrons behave differently when they are being observed. Working with this axiom of quantum physics, the filmmaker set out to explore aspects of the human consciousness that cannot be described by science. Along the way, the question arose: Does water communicate when people don’t see it?

Alain Badiou, born in 1937 in Morocco, demonstrated his exceptional skills in many fields of science, but became famous as a philosopher. The directorial duo the Kaylan brothers made their first feature film about Badiou, in which the philosopher himself talks about his work and personal life and presents his thoughts.

In fictional sequences inserted into this documentary about economic, social and political perspectives on possible upcoming developments, the filmmakers portray a utopian future as a foreign territory. Six public figures from various cultural and social circles reflect on the future as a matter of time, people and the world.

Armed with an ancient microscope invented in the 17th century by textile merchant Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the filmmaker travels through her native Brussels exploring everything she can get her hands on. The long series of subjective macro-details of strange shapes is accompanied by citations from van Leeuwenhoek’s letters.

A group of fifteen scientists head for Antarctica where they’ll spend 13 months, during which time they’ll study the skies from the best place on the planet. The film diary of one of the team members reveals glittering plains of snow, black nights full of stars, as well as isolation, frustration, and the longing to escape back to civilization.

The film Almost Nothing presents a behind-the-scenes look at CERN, the Center for Nuclear Research. Through interviews with theoretical physicists, technicians and other employees, the everyday operations of the organization and its cafeteria are revealed while discussing the most important questions about the universe that science is currently engaged in.