Jokes

Jean-Baptiste Maitre is fascinated by the pioneering years of cinema, when film was an experiment, a fusion of technology, poetry and alchemy. Back then there was no CGI and no blue-screen compositing, and everything that appeared on-screen was made by hand. Cinema was all about movement and the passage of time. Maitre tries to distill the essence of film by scanning and processing painted images into video – much like Stan Brakhage and his ilk did, with analog means, in the 1970s. These interventions lend the projection a physical component. In , primitive animations flutter while fragments of text appear in the world of splotches, stripes and indefinable visual noise. The film tells four short stories that have just one thing in common: the punch line. This is a dismantling of the joke, that shortest of all narrative forms. What remains is film at its purest.