Fabrice Lauterjung

After graduating from the Saint-Etienne School of Fine Arts in 2003, and obtaining his post-graduate degree in Lyon in 2004, Fabrice Lauterjung has been teaching at the ESAD and at the Jean Monnet University in Saint-Etienne.

“Filming is not so much freezing moments, as their impossible iteration. This is the challenge of what my definition of cinema is. First recording images—the way one lends an ear to listen to old fables—then listening to what they say: extracting from their obvious content a latent content.
If the urban space is often the theatre of my roaming, it is above all a pretext for the dehiscence of the images which capture it. The pace of large cities is favourable for surprises and is only tracked in dotted lines—at the rhythm of a recording mechanism. If the use of Super-8 film is frequent, this is firstly for its brief length—15 metres, a fleeting time span. Then intervene its silver properties, which distance the result from its origins: it’s actually impossible to instantly have access to things filmed, first of all they have to be developed. This expectation is part of the narrative preparation which will then ensue: on the images of the filming which memory kept in an imperfect state are superposed those fixed on the developed film, once viewed. They are then seen and re-seen, as if being called into question. Then, like those fables which, out of duty, we in our turn hand down, the images that have brought them into being assign a new space to words: film.
To this predominant approach in my work is added a series of experiences—some still cinematographic, others video-musical, others, lastly, textual—which I call “circumstantial”, more restricted, but just as formative of my approach.”

Fabrice Lauterjung, 2012
Translated by Simon Pleasance, 2015