Thibaut Rostagnat

Film

Rituel du pantin (Dummy's ritual) is a surrealist collage composed around the central figure of a ventriloquist’s dummy. This candid figure guides us through a universe at the meeting point between the religious baroque and concrete architecture. Its initiatory promenade is a line across the landscape, a rail along which it slides towards an introspective experience confronting it with other puppets. These animated marionettes make their way among contemporary themes such as the prostheses used in our bodies, the synthesis of our voices, and the myth of an artificial human consciousness.

It is a cartoon, a CGI animation film, offering forms of narrative through this medium and its frictions. The idea is to extend a thread between pictorial and narrative possibilities, outside the canons and stipulations of the industries that today use computer images as a dominant instrument of communication.

The obvious testimony of a naturalist pictorial heritage is envisaged here in a selective manner, organised by dotted touches, leaving blank spots on the canvas. Thus, in light and angular forms, the geometry sometimes agglomerates, and over it we see the jerky, fragile movements imparted to the figures.

Thibaut Rostagnat

Remerciements

Marie Bette, Maxime Champesme, Daniel Dobbels, Ramy Fischler, Paul Guilbert, Thomas Léon, Raphaël Moreira Gonçalves, Jonathan Pêpe, Louise Rabazzani, Hervé Rostagnat