A short Trip Through the Mysterious World of Mary Helena Clark's Films. An Interview.

Résumé En

An image device –whatever it may be– should resolve to adjust the psychic distance between a subject viewer and an image, which is organized by the play of some visual values. Looking an image marks the entrance of our real universe into a different space, the world of the image’s surface. Mary Helena Clark’s films performed around this legible separation between two distinct spaces: her images describe a world where reality is unusual, not hesitating to create mysterious associations that remind the dream logic. But her work is subtler in trying to put a distance from this paradigm ofthought. As a result, her work appears so unpredictable. If these films work well, it is because they never stop to question the perpetual strangeness of seeing ike a projection on a screen. How to develop a highly subjective vision of reality, knowing to take into consideration the viewer’s expectations? Maybe through a constantly magical vision which questioning our own relationship with reality. We’re thinking about After Writing (2008), a silent song for a lost abandon world, Orpheus (Outtakes) (2013) – citing Cocteau or referencing Keaton –a spectral movie with some ghosts of cinema or at least By Foot-Candle Light (2011)– a metaphor of the cinematographic device in a very subtle sense. Her woks subvert our expectations of the veracity of moving images, while she reaffirmed the vitality of a magic trick. Let us try to explore with her this fascinating world.