A R C H I V E2 0 0 1  
19th
  Michael Mazière
Triptych: Delirium – Blackout – Remember me
 
  UK 1996 - 2001
Betacam, 12:00 –10:00 –10:00, colour, sound
 
These dream texts are unashamedly subjective and existential works of visual sensuality - archeological digs into the unconscious. Part of an ongoing series, they explore human psychological conditions and the universal yet private emotional landscape which are all too often unspoken.

'Delirium' is a psychopoetic study of crazed and irrational visions, feelings and beliefs often associated with or induced by drugs or alcohol. Using source material from the film 'The Lost Weekend' and newly shot material the film explores the intense delusional yet seductive nature of escape and addiction. The work does not offer a position on the subject but rather presents in an experiential manner the Baudelarian pleasure and visionary quality of excess side by side with the illusionary phantasm and emotional crisis it engenders.

'Blackout' is a love story. Set in a cinematic world of desire, memory and beauty, it is a dialogue of loss between a man and a woman. The struggle for communication and intimacy is conveyed through re-edited voices from a classic Hollywood film combined with deeply poetic imagery. In 'Blackout' it seems that individual emotional experiences are conditioned and read through the mediated and collective world of cinema. In 'Blackout', Mazière captures the existential longing and unrequited desire which infuse many examples of classic European film, quoting from Louis Malle's 'Le Feu Follet' and Michelangelo Antonioni's 'L'Avventura', amongst others.

'Remember Me' is a dark, obsessive and emotive treatise on death. Its aim is to explore the intimate and often secret relationships that people have with mortality and loss. The tape uses original and 'found' footage to capture the complex web of emotions that surround death and to create a passionate journey through difficult private territories. Emotional power, lyric imagination and visual inventiveness of a universal subject. 'Remember Me' manages to convey an elegiac longing for its subject. It describes a masculinity in crisis, whose scattered futures are winningly portrayed.



Michael Mazière ° 1957 Grenoble, France
Lives and works in London, UK

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