Film A Traver

Through the Universe is the third section of my cinematic series Mes Villes d’Habitation (My Dwelling Towns). The film represents the autopsy of Saint-Marcellin, a small village in the Isère Region where I spent my childhood during the 50s. Through the Universe displays, in alphabetical order, all the 127 streets and 17 public squares of the town (updated to the period of the shooting, in 2004-2005), all shot following the same rules: in a 20-second-long wide, static, single shot. Every vista is preceded by the sign indicating the name of the street or plaza.

Documentation of different types, costumes and habits from Portugal.

Engineer Roger Courteville, accompanied by his wife and mechanic Julio Kotzent, undertakes a 10,000 km raid across the South American continent. The use of the car turns the crossing into an impossible adventure.

In 1928, the Jean d'Esme expedition crossed Cameroon, Gabon and Congo. Along the way, the natives of various ethnic groups willingly let themselves be photographed, show off their skills, explain their ritual dances, and display their tattoos, hairstyles and jewelry.

To be in Venice and see the architecture of New York, to perceive in a painting by Tintoretto the birth of animated images, to look at the burlesque Cretinetti as the ancestor of montage - so many shifts, displacements, and striking telescopings that Philippe-Alain Michaud proposes in this film dedicated to him. To follow this art historian, curator of the cinema collections at the Centre Pompidou, is to go from the oriental carpet to the film, or from the first fireworks to the cinema. And everywhere the animation of the images - projections of Antony McCall, or of Paul Sharits, Column without end of Brancusi, Pasolini's Accatone - everything moves! Under the tutelage of Aby Warburg, the great art historian of the early twentieth century, precursor of iconology and image comparison, to whom Philippe-Alain Michaud was the first in France to devote an important essay, eleven images are placed on the table to describe the singular journey of this art historian.

À travers l'univers à la Cinemateca Portuguesa de Lisbonne (June 22, 2017) is an episode of Gérard Courant's Filmed Notebooks shot during the retrospective of his films at the Cinemateca Portuguesa in Lisbon. In this episode of the Filmed Notebooks, António Rodrigues, programmer of the Cinemateca Portuguesa and Gérard Courant present to the public the session of Through the Universe.

"Compression de À travers l'univers" is the reduction of my film À travers l'univers from 1 hour to 18 minutes into a 4-minute movie. The film is "compressed" like a work by Arman or Caesar. But unlike the work of these artists who compressed usual objects, this self-compression reduces a purely artistic object. The tour de force and the bet of Compression de À travers l'universe was to make a total compression: in this film, there is no lack of a single shot of the original film!

"A Debate Across the Universe" is, on the one hand, the capture of the debate which followed the world premiere screening of my film "Across the Universe", presented as part of the "Ethnology and Cinema" in Grenoble, at the Les Méliès cinema in Saint-Marcellin and, on the other hand, the criticism of this debate and additional information relating to the staging of "Across the Universe".

French national Stéphane Bouquet, the illegitimate son of a U.S. soldier, goes looking for the father he never met in the United States' heartland.

Serge Moati describes his film as "the saga of the 'children of the roads', builders of the future who "will one day cross countries that will look like gardens", as a lyric-amphigouric dialogue prophesied, declaimed by actors, quite amateurs, crossed all along the dusty tracks..."

The most pretentious of any bomber traverse movie that you will watch. This 12 minute short documentary, with a nostalgia inducing playlist and witty jokes throughout, is the newest production from the older half of the Daughdrill Brothers. 4 days in the Talkeetna Mountains will make any man start to go crazy and it is clear to see in the abrupt ending that the main objective of these men was to make it out alive.

A cat tries to cross a street in Tel Aviv, prevented by computer bugs.

Former attorney, county prosecutor and Michigan Supreme Court Justice, John Voelker (alias Robert Traver) was born in 1903 in Ishpheming, Michigan in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. He "somehow survived the awesome experience of having spawned a National Best Seller, "ANATOMY OF A MURDER." Voelker was the defense attorney in the trial upon which the book is based. He used the pen name of Robert Traver thinking it would seem inappropriate for a sitting judge to also be a crime novelist.

1985, b/w, silent, 7min

Part science fiction, part homage to film history, this short black-and-white film fuses images of the moon with archival footage of King Mohammed V of Morocco’s face. All this swirling imagery is set to an eerie soundtrack that takes the viewer on a surreal journey. (Heure Exquise)