L'odeur de l'autre / A Borrowed Scent

​A Borrowed Scent is a twenty-five minutes short, an “audiovisual arrest” that will introduce the use of mindscape cinema as codified in the Mindscape Cinema Manifesto* of the director of the film. It is based on a short story by Simon Bartolo.

 

Storyline – Claude (28) is rather withdrawn person, living in an unusual place next to a big port. Guus (28) works at the nearby dock. They develop a bizzare relationship that risks being fatal.

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Concept – When a film refuses to be character or plot driven and decides to be cinema driven, highly compelled by the audiovisual experience, perceptiveness becomes its central interest: characters become audiovisual streams of consciousness or mental landscapes and the looseness of the plot allows the spectator to adapt and adopt the story in a personal way. Mindscape cinema aims, before all, to borrow the body of a spectator with the ambition of making them experience, instantly and directly, personally associated sensations coming from the characters' world.

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Note of Intention – This short is a personal investigation of the director to create an audiovisual piece that will introduce his approach to cinema. The core of his approach is to consider cinema as a powerful tool for sharpening the senses, re-establishing personal connections with the senses through an audiovisual experience. This type of cinema is inspired by the art of transgression and an extremely graphic/ material / corporeal / visceral approach to audiovisual art. Mindscape cinema is not interested in representations of life but in the experience of life – the one and only subject of its artwork is a pure life stream, captured by audiovisual means. This cinema opposes the creation of a state of trance – it creates an ambient/atmosphere that has the potential to disturb, alert, upset, wake up and sharpen our sensitivity towards our own perception. It tends to create visceral responses towards the content.

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References – The so-called “New French Extremity” in cinema has made an enormous impact on this project. Films of authors like Philippe Grandrieux, Gaspar Noé, Claire Denis, Catherine Breillat, Bruno Dumont, Olivier Assayas, Marina de Van opened a whole new world of possibilities to explore corporeal cinema and to create stories that communicate in extremely visceral ways. 

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