Maxime Martinot (France, 1989) is a French director, editor and writer. After studying filmmaking at Paris 8 (Master in Theory, Aesthetics and History of Cinema and Master in Direction and Creation), he works between France and Portugal. Between 2012 and 2020, he works as a programmer and co-organizer of the Festival des 3 Continents (Nantes, France). His films are screened and receive awards at prestigious international festivals such as FIDMarseille, Visions du Réel, New Horizons FF, Black Canvas FCC, Doclisboa, Hot Docs, Cinéma du Réel, Free Zone IFF or La Roche-sur-Yon IFF, among others. His first feature film, Three Tales by Borges (2018), wins two awards at FIDMarseille and is released in French theaters in 2018. His short essay film, History of the Revolution (2019), wins the André S. Labarthe Award for Best Short Film at Entrevues Belfort. Antelopes (2020) is nominated for the 2022 César Awards in the Best Documentary Short Film category, being awarded at Mash Up Film Festival, ForadCamp 2020 and Tenerife Shorts 2021 . His latest feature film, The Trail of the Asphodels (2023), wins a Special Mention (CNAP Award) at FIDMarseille 2023.

Cinema, instructions for use: shake before use

Maxime Martinot has spent a decade developing an oeuvre characterized by the dialogue established between the different films that make it up in a sort of mosaic that combines the aesthetics of documentary, fiction and cinema of thought; self-reflexivity; the archive of film and audiovisual history; the praxes of avant-garde and experimental cinema and an implicit –and sometimes radically explicit– ideological re-reading of both the medium itself and the themes to be developed.

Some of these interactions are materialized on the surface of the films: evidencing from the beginning what factors motivate their genesis –History of the Revolution or The Trail of the Asphodels–, making perceptible the phases that shape them –Animal Eye–, or insinuating that their genesis is only possible after a research process that involves the previous collection of audiovisual material, as well as its subsequent selection and recontextualization to achieve the desired objective –The Film You are About to See–.

But it should be emphasized that these relationships are possible thanks to the vertebral capacity of an enabling montage that allows the filmmaker to go beyond the merely argumentative or the obviously argumentative. The synergies established between the images and between these and the sounds exponentially amplify our aesthetic experience, revealing that the territory transcends what is represented by the map. 

Opting for this model allows him to question an audience that is actively dispersed in proposals that appeal directly to their imagination and relational capacity. As they interact with the films, they discover that these films find in dialectics their main raison d’être, since they are attracted by it at the argumentative, discursive, aesthetic and formal levels, affecting language and form, as well as the ideas and concepts mobilized.

Two of the feature films that make up the focus converse in a fluid and almost causal way. For The Trail of the Asphodels organically reaches the chimerical objective to which the filmmaker of Animal Eye aspired: “to materialize the animal point of view” by means of that camera that moves at will and whim, that stops and deviates to get back on track, that fixes its attention on numerous stimuli while mapping a route –that of the asphodels–, a territory, a landscape and a humanscape that seem to condense the world and its history. The third feature film, Three Tales by Borges, a tribute to the fabulous and creative universe of the Buenos Aires author and an inspired illustration of the specular –and abysmal– capacity of cinema and literature, evidences one of Martinot’s most outstanding characteristics: the validation of the communicative, expressive, aesthetic, rhetorical, phonic, graphic… function of the word, be it oral, written or absent.

Four short films complete the program of this focus. While The Disappearance, the filmmaker’s short film debut, draws on the styles of European auteur cinema to unravel the emotional itinerary of a young woman in permanent flight (and absence), the other three films reveal all the aesthetic and political potential offered by audiovisual appropriation and bricolage. If Antelopes draws on drone images guided by a text by Marguerite Duras to talk about our animal condition, The Film You are About to See takes the form of a minimalist, vitriolic and joyful manual that highlights and deconstructs the intersections between history, creation, cinema, norm and freedom. For its part, History of the Revolution deploys a judicious and fruitful arsenal of visual and sound resources to illustrate the different meanings and conceptions of a word that exceeds its condition as a word itself: revolution.

All these films will help us discover a filmmaker as unique as deserving of the first international focus dedicated to his work.

Suso Novás