The winner of the fourth Rencontres d'Arles curatorial research fellowship is Matthieu Orléan for the project The Scrapbook’s Role in Experimental Film.

This research aims not to examine the place of scrapbooks in art history, but the particular use experimental filmmakers made of it in the second half of the 20th century in direct or indirect connection with their work, often in silver film (in the 1950s as well as today). Made from a wide variety of images, scrapbooks are a way of preserving memories, but those created by the filmmakers here (Stan Brakhage, Derek Jarman, Shuji Terayama) are also their limit and critical reverse side. It is an eminently plural, non-chronological work of memory with no interest in interpersonal transmission, as is the case with many diarists. These scrapbooks reveal a subjective, polyphonic self-fiction where memory that functions based on the idea not of juxtaposition but montage - to use a film term - between the emotional and the social, the private and the public, the amateur and the technological.

The Rencontres d'Arles curatorial research fellowship receives generous support from Jean-François Dubos.


MATTHIEU ORLÉAN
Born 1975 in Paris, France. 
Lives and works in Paris.

Since 2004 Matthieu Orléan has been head of temporary exhibitions at the Cinémathèque française, where he curated the exhibitions Dennis Hopper et le Nouvel Hollywood (2008), Le Monde enchanté de Jacques Demy (2013), Martin Scorsese (2015) and Gus Van Sant Icônes (2016). Since 1998 he has written about film and the visual arts in the press and various books (Chantal Akerman, Autoportrait en cinéaste et Raymond Hains, J’ai la mémoire qui planche, éditions du Centre Pompidou). In 2011, Éditions de l'œil will publish La Maison cinéma, a book about the filmmaker Paul Vecchiali.