| As if…(a Tennis Court) |
| Animation | dv | color | 7'0'' | France | 2006 |
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© C. Merlhiot, B. Vapné
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This film is conceived as a "psycho-architectural" experience. A nearly meaningless event - a stray ball – launches a series of uncontrolled transformations on a tennis court. From this moment on, the surface of the tennis court starts to change shape without the viewer knowing whether he/she is witnessing a mental experience or a true event. The playground gradually becomes anamorphosis to take the form of a module of architecture. This module develops and multiplies to shape a city that keeps expanding and delineates a traffic network.
Suddenly the ball's trajectory hits the image and totally absorbs the camera's viewpoint. Like a flow of energy, the image gets caught within the rhythm of an accelerating motion. After a while, the camera slowly begins to drift towards the edge of the space. The viewer can make out the impact left by the ball on the tennis court, and the image slowly scans the whole surface. Was the game really interrupted or is the film but a temporal deflagration occurring inside one of the players' mind?
Christian Merlhiot was born in Niort in 1963. He studied at the National School of Fine Art in Bourges from 1981 to 1987. In 1994 and 1995 he was an artist-in-residence at the Villa Medicis in Rome, where he made his first full-length film, "Les semeurs de peste" (1995). Since then, he has produced several others, including: "Voyage au pays des vampires" (2001), "Chronique des Love-hôtels au Japon" (2002), and "Silenzio" (2005). Christian Merlhiot has taught cinema and video in several art schools, notably at Angoulême, Nancy, and Bourges. He is currently the education director at the Pavillon, Laboratoire de création du Palais de Tokyo in Paris.
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