trip to Marseille (w/ Andrée) to shoot the sea with 10 super-8 cameras

In September 2000, we purchased 10 black-and-white super-8 film rolls, borrowed 10 Super-8 cameras and tripods, and took the train from Geneva to Marseille, in order to shoot 10 sequences of the Mediterranean seashore.

The idea was to project them as infinite loops side-by-side, on multiple screens, in order to obtain an extremely wide panoramic image of the ocean.

At the very moment we reached the sea front, and were setting up the cameras, a violent storm started and heavy rain began to pour down. We just had time to complete the shooting, and rushed our equipment back into the cars.

Rain kept falling the whole evening, the whole city was underwater, and most trains were cancelled on the following day.

The film rolls were developed, but most of them proved unsatisfying: many of the cameras were faulty, the images lacked in contrast, and despite the storm, the mediterranean waves looked pretty small and unimpressive.

The project was never finalized.

The present sequence is one of the few digitized fragments that remain.

Notes

Some of those rolls were projected as loops during a sound performance at Fête de la Musique in June 2001, as part of the platform ï.l.e [inouï.ludique.experimental] curated by Cicero Egli and Catalina Ramelli (using half a dozen super-8 projectors provided by Filippo Filliger).