La Fondation Gérard Courant

Every year since 1980, I have filmed the Good Friday ceremony reconstructing the Passion of Christ in Burzet, a remote village in the Ardèche area, where for seven hundred years, the local people have dressed up to celebrate and perpetuate this religious rite. (Gérard Courant)

Le Passeur immobile, which covers the year 1987, is a Booklet filmed stuck between The Days and the Nights (1986) and The Artifice and the Fake (1988). These Notebooks have been punctuating my activity as a filmmaker for about fifteen years. They are like a life parallel to my other films and film series (Cinema, Group Portrait, Read, etc.). They are also like a letter to the spectators.

I give a methodical account of my film work: the creation of new series (Lire, Trio, Avec Mariola), the shooting of a new feature film (Amours décolorées which will take ten years to edit) with Mariola San Martin.

Two New York women, Kristin and Doreen, live a black and white life, but in color of Gene Tierney, a star of 40’ Hollywood melodrama, while listening to the old songs of Marilyn Monroe. They go from one extreme to the other (from dream to reality, from day to night, from black and white to color), and so travel symbolically through this timelessness. Kristin disappears and Doreen is lost is the big city. Her meetings with Marcel, a filmmaker, then David, a sculptor, accomplish nothing, and she is destroyed by daylight. But her Memory of Gene Tierney triumphs over night and death, and Cinema can continue.

Autour de 24 Passions is the making-of of my film 24 Passions . It was shot in 2003, on the occasion of the 24th year of filming this film on the Stations of the Cross of Burzet, in Ardèche. (Gérard Courant)

Every year since 1980, I have filmed the Good Friday ceremony reconstructing the Passion of Christ in Burzet, a remote village in the Ardèche area, where for seven hundred years, the local people have dressed up to celebrate and perpetuate this religious rite. (Gérard Courant)

Every year since 1980, I have filmed the Good Friday ceremony reconstructing the Passion of Christ in Burzet, a remote village in the Ardèche area, where for seven hundred years, the local people have dressed up to celebrate and perpetuate this religious rite. (Gérard Courant)

"Villagium" is a film made from a stationary one-and-a-half-hour shot, which shows the storm and the rain in the street, by the church in the village of Priay, Ain.

Made up of nine long sequence shots, Hinnis is an episode of Gérard Courant's Carnets filmés which celebrates the Ain River in spring in Priay.

In March 1977, I published a poem about Magdalena Montezuma, actress, collaborator, and inspiration of German filmmaker Werner Schroeter, in issue 13 of the magazine Les Soleils d'Infernalia . This poem was included in my book Werner Schroeter, published by the Cinémathèque Française and the Goethe Institut in January 1982. To celebrate the 30th anniversary of my encounter with this brilliant actress, who passed away too soon, at the Berlin Film Festival in February 1980, I printed the text of this poem directly onto around twenty frames of The Death of Maria Malibran , Werner Schroeter's masterpiece.

Every year since 1980, I have filmed the Good Friday ceremony reconstructing the Passion of Christ in Burzet, a remote village in the Ardèche area, where for seven hundred years, the local people have dressed up to celebrate and perpetuate this religious rite. (Gérard Courant)

Every year since 1980, I have filmed the Good Friday ceremony reconstructing the Passion of Christ in Burzet, a remote village in the Ardèche area, where for seven hundred years, the local people have dressed up to celebrate and perpetuate this religious rite. (Gérard Courant)

Every year since 1980, I have filmed the Good Friday ceremony reconstructing the Passion of Christ in Burzet, a remote village in the Ardèche area, where for seven hundred years, the local people have dressed up to celebrate and perpetuate this religious rite. (Gérard Courant)

Castellum medievalevale is a film made up of a single fixed sequence shot, about ten minutes long, filmed with a telephoto lens, from the heights of the commune of Priay, in the Ain department, which shows the Château des Allymes. (As the crow flies, these two places are separated by 11 kilometers).

Every year since 1980, I have filmed the Good Friday ceremony reconstructing the Passion of Christ in Burzet, a remote village in the Ardèche area, where for seven hundred years, the local people have dressed up to celebrate and perpetuate this religious rite. (Gérard Courant)