Who are we ?
Since 1992, the date of its creation in Paris, the association Circuit Court puts together production work, the dissemination of creative works and the emergence of unique audiovisual writings. It thereby participates actively to the revival of creation.
Initially Circuit Court was more oriented towards experimental cinema, developing a production job by editing video compilations of short films under the name "Films without quality" (with Henri-Francois Imbert, Pip Chorodov, Denis Merejkowsky, Pierre Chevalier or Philippe Stepzak), It created an exchange network with associative structures, institutional actors and galleries in France and abroad.
The association has been recognized for its work in the field of short films on the Super 8 format, but also through his collaborations with visual artists, musicians and performers. It led the association to wonder about these different media representation. Meanwhile, it has also created a film archive dedicated to the storag of family films and amateur films under the name of Cinememoire.net.
Established since 1996 in Marseilles, Circuit Court has never separated the production and diffusion of documentaries, of animation films, video art and digital art. It takes the form of programming, installations and performances. Since 2004, Circuit Court organizes international meetings in multimedia arts (RIAM) in Marseilles. It is to be seen as the continuation of an approach developed over ten years. Through scattered networks, RIAM draws a path in the city, enabling everyone to find some time to meet with the art. There is a limited number of artists, all of them a specific and deliberate choice. We are not trying to define "trans-media arts" as an autonomous field, but to bring these practices into a continuity, through the establishment of bridges between contemporary creation and a reflection on the aesthetic and ethical implications of new technologies.
The designation "films without quality" may be understood as a manifesto against a field where the sterile visual efficiency of finished products is dominant. Primarily, the point is to highlight the "independent" dimension within a cinema increasingly subject in the way they go towards the public to the dominance of both producers, distribution networks and the logic of "ratings". "Badly done, well done, not done" already said Robert Filliou by establishing a principle of equivalence between all those principles. If it is impossible to define "quality", the filmmakers play delightfully on this criterion, introducing absurd, irony and nonsense in their films through a subversive strategy.
The objective is also to desecrate the rituals and codes that identify the territory of "art cinema" in an artistic lineage that goes back from slapstick comedy, grindhouse movies, Dada, Fluxus, the Situationists and movies lettrists to music videos, the Shadocks or even Jackass. A network of elective affinities. including the diversion of amateur home movies or recycling of other sources of images not seen a "cinematographic" . They reject the logic of production imposed by the industry, including hierarchy and division of work as , to establish a flexible structure, of human scale, built on cooperation and self-production . The irony is towards the technical capabilities of an ultra efficient cinema to highlight the critical strategy in terms of topics.
A againt all the rhetoric about the position of the Author carried by the establishment, they open the film to incoherence, to awkward hesitation, to exuberant banality, with a taste for failure and quick destruction.