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EDITO 2003

The third international festival of experimental video de Marseille will be held from June the 30th to the July the 4th at the Lices - 12, rue des Lices /13007 Marseille.
This festival thus takes figure, and this figure is the more enigmatique of all: the triangle. Thus let us to try to seek the unit of that trinite on fabric.
Experimental, with the direction of which the festival tries to explore the not yet cleared ways, this festival is that by its structure and its operation: more than 150 videos received, of all the continents, 38 selected, and however, no prize. Our universe is not that of the competition. There is however selection, this one takes place according to criteria's which don't relevent of a rigid constraint but of the direction followed by the directors: in the difficulty, the debate, the ceaseless handing-over in question, the held, it must try to follow the mobile and fragile line, almost invisible, which traces contours of the experimental.
Initially the image is not servile, that must say enslaved to the representation, for the narrative or symbolic image, but a simple and organized material, to the object which organizes it and overhangs it, pretext to the performance. To the service of anything else that itself, sculpture of light and of sound which refuses the unmemorable privilege of the eye, always associated at the capacities of the spirit, that the obviousness or the natural light of the ancients, attest it. We assert some power of the blindness, which makes us find the clairvoyance. To burst the eyes, not to follow the traces of Oedipus, but those of Tiresias. A learned ignorance, therefore, an asceticism preliminary to libertinage of the directions, an examination of all that makes vision the most abstract direction, that which moves away us from the world all while bringing us closer, to find like a paddle of the glance, a dawn of the concrete, rough, sensual vision.
Then that the time of the work is a space-time. That it is contemporary of itself and not the vestige memoriel of a abolished reality. We refuse the trace with the profit of the event. That is for that which we are fidèles at the obscure room, at the black work which is born at each projection. This alchemy, let us hold we it for paramount: let us acknowledge to it any Net: we still believe at the work. And the room of cinema is for us the matrix which gives birth to, the screen which is created with darkness.
We understands better since the five programs which constitute the frame of the festival: Time - Space - Movement - Perception - Direction. Each program will be presented twice in the week, and a video library with the card will make it possible to see all films received except selection, with possibility of projection to the request.
H.B.