Videoclub

For the second edition of the new series REPERTOIRE, where experimental filmmakers from the orbit of the renowned FIDMarseille Festival are invited for in-depth discussions, filmmaker Serge Garcia will be on-site to participate in a conversation about their work.

FIDMarseille is an International Film Festival with competitive sections, a policy of world and international premieres, and distinguished hosts. The festival aims to be attentive to contemporary cinematic writing, whether fiction or documentary, short or feature-length films. It offers a unique program to a broad local, national, and international audience.

Grand Central Hotel
United States / 2021 / 22’
Serge Garcia

The camera is placed in the foyer of the eponymous hotel, the lens turned towards the door. Pulling a suitcase on wheels, instead of a clear, distinct figure, a hazy shadow crosses the threshold. It could almost be the start of a film noir or a tribute to Chantal Akerman’s Hotel Monterey. Or perhaps a bit of both: it’s the beginning of a very idiosyncratic interview with an iconoclast of the electro scene – Terre Thaemlitz, better known by the moniker DJ Sprinkles.

Why idiosyncratic? Because, very specifically, it’s this idea of idiosyncrasy that the film strives to demolish. Firstly, although the camera follows the character into the privacy (by definition protected) of the asylum of a hotel room (taking a shower, masturbating, sleeping), none of their features are revealed. The character retains their mystery, like in a fantasy movie, a faceless person with a vague outline, mobile, an undefined being – a person for whom the notion of identity has drifted off course. And secondly, because it’s off camera, always and unavoidably off camera as if emanating from the depths of a secret revealed there, the protagonist’s voice theorises exactly that. With a rare shrewdness and driven by a disconcerting determination, the voice speaks of itself as a theoretical being, and what such a demanding existence requires on a practical level, refusing gender assignment, and laying claim to constant shifts, endless and precarious change. But this also means rejecting all the terms in vogue to challenge the vocabulary and to try and express this glorious instability without stabilising it again. Being a hotel, in short, welcoming all tendencies without ever locking them down, without ever taking them for granted – this is “who” Serge Garcia has chosen to accommodate for a night in his sober and explosive Grand Central Hotel.
– Jean-Pierre Rehm

A General Disappointment
United States / 2022 / Couleur / 16 mm, 35 mm / 27’
Serge Garcia

Divided into three chapters, A General Disappointment is an existential meditation based on a text read through a series of long still frames. These stage the director Serge Garcia in everyday situations that are suffused with a depressive sense of the grotesque, where what is mundane becomes absurd, thus weighing heavily on the character’s solitary body. As a counterpoint to this silent, pedestrian everyday scene, the text may be seen in subtitles, like some inner voice that brings to mind, through the telling of odd anecdotes, the caustic meanderings of Woody Allen or Larry David. The basic logorrheic scheme to A General Disappointment matches its wonderous precision as well as its reflexive density. After Grand Central Hotel (FID 2021), Serge Garcia again puts together a cinematic object at the service of discourse, and devises a means to bring together literature (his own and, among others, by Kathryn Scanlan) and philosophical thought (by Lauren Berlant). This he does by dint of neat, long framings. As Serge Garcia is sitting in a parked car, eating away from a noodle dish that inevitably brings to mind the dreariness of an undercover cop’s life in second-rate crime films, the text invites one to ponder over the systemic failures inherent to capitalist societies, and over how vain their promises of happiness and self-fulfilment are. Short scenes come and go from the street to a room, in a motion reasserting the political dimension of the intimate. In so doing, it also confirms that the necessary analysis of our most personal affects (feelings of maladjustment, frustrations, neuroses) are themselves manufactured and normed. Through a close-up on an amplifier, the voice of Laurene LaVallis, some soon-forgotten 1980s singer, reverses the operation of concentration, from reading to full listening as a potentiality for a reappropriation of one’s body in the present. Unostentatiously, what Serge Garcia weaves is some presence in the world and unto oneself.
– Claire Lasolle, FIDMarseille