L’Ange ( The Angel) Patrick Bokanowski (70mins / 35mm / 1982 / France)
Patrick Bokanowski, French filmmaker and artist born in 1943, is an unclassifiable alchemist of celluloid, author of some of the most fantastic visions in French cinema.
He developed a manner of treating filmic material that crosses all the boundaries of film genre. His work lies on the edge between optical and plastic art, in a ‘gap’ of constant reinvention.
Bokanowski’s experiments attempt to open the art of film up to other possibilities of expression, testifying to a purely mental vision, unconcerned with film’s conventional representations, affecting and metamorphosing reality, and thereby offering to the viewer of his films new adventures in perception.
L’Ange (The Angel) is surely Bokanowski’s magnum opus, his masterpiece. A prolonged, dense and visually visceral experience of the kind that is rare in cinema today.
This mesmerising film creates a labyrinthine, Kafka-esque halfworld of chambers and baroque, macabre characters, all connected by a central staircase. Its strangeness is quite unique; a combination of experimental cinema, photography, animation and painting.
Visually stunning magisterial images seething in the amber of transcendent soundscapes. L’Ange creates a world that is visually quite distinct from what we consider “reality,” while providing a wide range of implicit references to it. Through many optical and poetic devices, repetitions and mysterious actions, he explores levels of reality that lie beneath and beyond the conventional surfaces of things.
This film should be seen by all magicians, witches, psychic explorers and occultists, book your tickets now!
Greg Pope. 