Richard Misek – Film: Mapping Rohmer

Film: Mapping Rohmer
Richard Misek

Sun 27th 6pm – 6.20pm
Open Platform Stage

Mapping Rohmer is a short video work exploring representations of urban space in the films of Eric Rohmer. Rohmer was the quintessential Parisian film-maker: he lived in Paris, worked in Paris, and died in Paris. Between the late 1950s and mid-2000s, he shot over twenty short films, feature films, and documentaries on location in Paris. Situated at the frontier between remix cinema and digital film criticism, Mapping Rohmer engages with Rohmer’s film-making through video-making. Using only footage from Rohmer’s films, it takes a cinematic journey through Rohmer’s Paris. It looks through Rohmer’s lens, and follows the various paths that he, his actors, and his camera together traced through the city.

Over the course of its development, the project has itself traced various paths – notably, between the academic and the artistic. It started as a presentation at the Oxford University Institute for Internet Studies. It was then reworked and expanded into a book chapter (‘Cinematic Cartography in Post-War Paris’ in Mapping Cultures: Place, Practice, Performance, ed. Les Roberts, 2011). The version being screened at Tracing Mobility incorporates elements of both, and points towards Rohmer in Paris, a feature-length remix documentary due to be completed in early 2012.

Image: Richard Misek