Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster seems to have constructed her cinematic work whilst hopping from one island to another. She travelled from Corsica to Japan to Brazil, making seven films in seven years with the support of independent production companies and the French government.¹ The works include two films made in collaboration with Ange Leccia, four made by the artist alone, and a 'cartoon' produced within the framework of the Annlee project, a truly collective enterprise.

In 1996 'home cinema' appeared on the hi-fi/high-tech scene. Although a brilliant future was predicted, the product never really caught on. Price was a deterrent. However, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and her friends Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe saw in home cinema the possibility of placing the viewer not in front of but inside the film. The underlying idea was that as soon as we are in a room equipped with the appropriate projection equipment, we are contained both within the room and within the image that invades the same space. We are both at home and at one with our new surroundings - a Dolby surround-sound system and a metallic, panoramic, digital image providing almost 3D visual and aural effects. The obvious way to experience it all is from the comfort of a good sofa. Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster was convinced. Why, she asked herself, do we need to go through the effort of going into town to a cinema when we can go to the movies in our own home and experience a whole array of different spaces and stories?² So the scene was set. The potential of home cinema was to provide the metaphoric structure for the ambience and climate of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's cinematic output for the next seven years. Her cinema is submerged but open, internalised but accessible. Her films are perceptive and psycho-sensitive, composed of selected 'visual segments', sometimes carefully prepared, sometimes captured spontaneously from a moving vehicle. In the words of Stéphanie Moisdon-Trembley, 'Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster does not produce images but attempts to discover how they are created on the boundaries of the visible world, amid the turmoil, confusion and mumbo-jumbo of signs and symbols, at the point where information becomes blurred'.³ It is cinema that simply hangs around.

These films probe and record the world of images while hovering at the edge of psychological effect. They surreptitiously contemplate shadowy landscapes, cityscapes and empty spaces, counter-balancing them with splashes of colour, views of a crowd or solitary, melancholy figures that serve as both starting points and subjective positions. In other words, the viewer is present with what Maurizio Lazzarato calls a 'nondescript singularity', an individual forever isolated in the landscape associated with the fictions and narratives that bind us to one another. All our to-ings and fro-ings are superbly illustrated in the films in ways that highlight a world of experiences offered to us wholesale and without the benefit of instructions for use. They create an atmospheric effect because of the process of their collation, making the images appear assembled rather than edited - even though some editing must take place.

At the same time, the artist does not write stories in the classic cinematographic sense of the word, although the more narrative works - Riyo, Plages and Central - have a beginning and an end. Instead, Gonzalez-Foerster can be said to make multi-faceted cinema. Her work is a sort of cinematic disco ball, captured by the immediate and longer-term memory of both the filmmaker and the spectator, and then modified at leisure by the need to remember and feel the pleasure of recollecting and prolonging certain colour sensations and psychological moments. We, the viewers, also need to clarify our own role and the immediate and possibly delayed effect of the images that can leave a deep impression in a matter of minutes.

For these reasons, Gonzalez-Foerster's films are hard to categorise. Her images are eloquent but not garrulous, they activate and shift memories and feelings. Here, the brain functions as a mixing desk, no doubt because the images are variously momentary (the fireworks in Plages), downright annoying (shots centred on a chandelier), floating (an illuminated building), full of details loaded with meaning - or what Barthes calls 'punctum' - (neon lights everywhere), reflective (the blue of the sky, architecture, water and the feeling of disappearance as the sun shines under the landing stage of the ferry in Central), painterly (the moon, again), structural (the clocks in Ipanema Théories that recur for an hour and a half), secondary (a platform on the Tokyo underground), and irregular, to the point of suggesting an idea of permanent cinema. Permanent not because the films are concerned with constant change, which no one cares about any more, but because they are conceived in a world that is actually post-cinematographic. This is a world in which cinematic image and narrative intertwine and unobtrusively structure all human interaction - even the inter-images both on film and in the mind of the spectator.

Ipanema Théories, Ile de beauté and Gold offer grainy, video-like images, despite the fact that the last two were filmed on 35mm. They also contain other images with a more directly cinematic look, highly polished, elegant and analogic. In Riyo, shot at nightfall on the north bank of Kyoto's Kamo River, the camera makes its way along the river in a slow, linear tracking shot. In Plages, filmed at night from the top of a building in Rio, it moves in waves as it hovers above Copacabana and the sinuous, two-tone pattern of the pavement at the edge of the ocean. In Central, shot on Super8 beside the Star Ferry Terminal opposite the Hong Kong cityscape, blue-tinted in the early morning light and set imposingly at the water's edge, it lovingly focuses on the architecture along the broad promenade. Such moments and movements - empty, meditative, emotional, deliberately multi-directional and transitory, and with their blend of sound and vision - recall the inherent atmosphere of the films of Marguerite Duras, Chantal Ackerman, Kitano, Antonioni and Wong Kar-Waï. Like them, Gonzalez-Foerster leaves viewers (and the artist herself who is the protagonist of all the films) to their own devices. Finally we are free to close our eyes or to succumb to the pleasure of the images, text and sound; to stay or to leave as the fancy takes us, simply because this type of mesmerising beauty can - according to mood and level of receptiveness - quickly become either tiresome or mind-blowingly charged with energy. Images can somehow be personalised, becoming what the British psychoanalyst DW Winnicott in his book Playing and Reality calls 'potential spaces'. The book uses the term when examining the interaction between individual consciousness and experiences shared with others and, ever since her earliest room installations, Gonzalez-Foerster has manipulated this concept by applying to any work of art the theory that artist and spectator each make a 50/50 contribution. This version of Marcel Duchamp's aphorism, 'it is the viewers who make the pictures', inclines towards the 'transitional objects' beloved of psychoanalysis. Her cinema is a mental-relay station, atmospheric, abstract, internal, obviously visual, lit from within and ready to transmit feelings and stories aimed at individuals rather than a mass audience. While it is noticeable that the films produced by the artist's collective sales-and-distribution company, Anna Sanders Films, have not found their way into the traditional cinema-distribution network, she clearly would appreciate that screenings were not only confined to exhibition spaces.

The screen is where reality and imagination co-exist, linking the on-screen world to each individual's own life experience before, during and after the film. In the cinematic dynamic of Ipanema Théories, for example, the screen becomes an interface between the images and the spectator; its 'film within a film', similar to a film shown in the background during a celebration or a concert, makes possible all kinds of sound mixes. 'A film for people passing through', says the artist, a crazy film on video that, to some degree, no longer needs a screen as it can happily be projected anywhere (on a piece of cloth, a wall or a monitor). As Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's visionary and schizoid Annlee promised 'there will be no security zone; you will disappear into your screens'. This prediction is based on the fact that in the absence of other imagery, emotions themselves have always produced pictures. It also implies that, whatever screens may be available today, we accept the idea that in the visual world the artist is now the only tourist we can rely on. In this context, it seems logical that Gonzalez-Foerster should have chosen to create Exotourisme, an animated film viewed from an angular viewing chamber framing the screen, as her entry for the Marcel Duchamp Prize (Centre George Pompidou, Paris, October to December 2002). The origin of the film is 'the transcription of several experiences, an accumulation of memories, a questioning of visual perception and the urge that drives us to want to see'.⁴ The artist justifies her own position, saying that she wanted to make films by literally arranging the facets of sensitive, semi-conscious memory that has already been recorded and edited and yet continues to be latent, renewable and fleeting. Curiously, the memories that remain are those that have escaped. This is why there can never be a clear image of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's films, beyond the fact that the final interpretation is left to the viewer. Gerhard Richter has said that 'to paint a blur you must keep hold of your brush', thereby making room for emotions aroused by transitory images. There has to be a willingness and a desire to 'decipher the future like a rainy day' (the last line of Central), to decrypt and plunge into the areas of light interference in order to access a place where there is no refuge, either for the viewer or the auteur sheltering behind the camera and the editing suite. To see Ipanema Théories as a 'visual and sensory multi-theory of movements, encounters, climate and light in an urban environment' is to become aware of sensation, to understand the meaning of stealth.⁵ Is that not one of the privileges of cinema, the ability to take what Annlee calls 'a trip to nowhere'?

That is why Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's films are impossible to describe and why they constitute a critical and complementary extension to the room installations that began her career. Her films linger in the present.

Translated by Isabel Vare

- Alexis Vaillant