Retouches [2008]

Retouches

Retouches features a series of repeated visual cycles, an animation painted on celluloid that examines transformation in the world around us.

As with 78 tours and Jeu, Georges Schwizgebel tries to grasp the ungraspable -- movement itself -- by playing with notions of perception and representation, changing the balance of shapes for amazing metamorphoses. He turns someone going upstairs into a hurdler and hair being brushed into a windswept forest; as for a tennis game, the ball remains motionless and the court whirls spectacularly around it.

Finally the film calms down into an image of a sleeping woman perhaps dreaming of the very images we ourselves have just observed. Retouches is the virtuoso dream of a visual acrobat.