THE FILM YOU ARE ABOUT TO SEE

Please note that the film you are about to see is taken from real film history material, namely the disclaimers and warnings that frame the existence of films. Any allusion to the moralism affecting the life of images would be purely unintentional.

From the outset, the title stirs up memories of all the peripheral prose visible at the beginning of a film or displayed in film theatres to give the spectator some imperious warning. The film is said to be, as a selection shows: based on a true story; not for the faint-hearted; a reflection of the world view of its author only; the property of its owners who naturally do not tolerate piracy… The accumulation of these messages gathered here into an anthology, all taken from real life and placed on a timeline stretching back to the magic lantern and further, reveals several things. First that cinema, a fraudulent art, a perfect illusion, has had to reckon with an iconophobic tradition that has constantly sought to police it. Next, that defying all these attempts, it has remained a contrabandist, occult and disquieting spectacle – in short, that it has lost none of the powers that spellbound the very first audiences. The short excerpts of films that Maxime Martinot slips in between the intertitles are another way of saying it, where the tiniest gesture creates something of a deflagration. So, rather than being saddened by the legal straightjacket in which the merchants, like the puritans, have wanted to confine cinema, The Film You Are About to See invites us to delight in this unbroken power. Among the mass of collected warnings, nothing says it better than the unexpected presence of two significantly more poetic intertitles from Robert Bresson’s films: the film “that you are about to see” is never the same as those you have already seen. 

Jérôme Momcilovic