Educational Media Reviews Online

Christian Lebrat’s Vibrations is a kind of retrospective of 9 of his films from 1976 to 1985. Re:Voir put a great deal of work into the accompanying booklet which contains an interview with the artist as well as excerpts from publications and drawings which contextualize his positions vis-à-vis his work.

Lebrat’s main concern really boils down to the persistence of vision and how what we see projected is not really what is projected because our eyes contribute to the final picture. “for this reason, the work of a filmmaker is essentially to do with rhythm, speed, movement and mutations of light” he claims in the booklet. Lebrat studied fine arts at university and switched to film when a friend gave him an 8mm camera. He was very much influenced by the work of Mark Rothko, particularly how his immense paintings overwhelmed him with their use of color.

In Film numero deux, Lebrat uses a moving mask, and as his first finished film, it is a nod to film history and film production/exhibition as well as to the early filmic avant-garde. The film is silent as are most of the films in this collection and the booklet provides information about how the mask was used. Couleurs délicieuses sur fond bleu is more abstract with swerving camera movements while Organization becomes a purely abstract film using color stripes where the afterimage causes the viewer’s brain to interpret as color. Also included in this collection are the two-projector films Liminal Minimal I and Liminal II, where the simultaneous projection of both films causes movement and in addition, in the performance the projectors also move.

Lebrat continues using moving strips of film where the illusion of movement is created through the projection of still images. This is where the basic definition of the term “animation” comes from. His first film using sound is Trama from 1980 where the flashing of colored stripes creates the illusion of movement. Holon is silent and essentially a more pure and hallucinogenic Trama. The last film in the collection, Le Moteur de l’action (A.M.D) (1985) is the least successful of the group. It involves playing a found soundtrack reel of a dramatic film over the still image of a still image of that soundtrack placed on a sheet of paper. If the soundtrack were an optical track rather than a magnetic track, it would have been perfect had it been projected and continued his thinking about seeing what is not actually on film. It’s impossible to tell from the image whether the soundtrack is tape or film, optical or magnetic. The two disparate items constituting the film do not contribute fully to the Lebrat’s oeuvre to that point in his career and should possibly have been omitted from the otherwise exciting and cohesive collection.

This DVD is highly recommended for anyone interested in abstract film and the intersection of film and painting, and the meaning of “seeing”.