Choros
2011 · 12m · États-Unis
Directed by Michael Langan, Terah Maher
Genres: experimental, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, mythic, surreal
A lone dancer’s slow, ample movements multiply through chronophotography into a surreal chorus of thirty-two female figures, tracing a spare cycle of life, death and rebirth.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Chronophotography as narrative device is clever enough, but the film never quite commits to the weirdness—it's too reverent of its own formal conceit, too content to let the technique do the heavy lifting instead of actually *doing* something subversive with it.
The multiplication of the dancer's body across time echoes both experimental cinema's lineage (Muybridge, Deren) and contemporary video art's formal rigor, creating a meditation on embodiment and temporality that justifies every considered compositional choice in service of its mythic throughline.
The decision to hold the frame still while the chronophotographic layers accumulate transforms what could've been a technical showpiece into something genuinely haunting—that restraint, that refusal to cut or move the camera, is what elevates the repetition into ritual.
Reviews
Cette expérience visuelle et narrative envoûtante ouvre la voie à d'autres tentatives de faire vivre autrement le corps à l'écran. Comme « Pas de deux » à son époque, « Choros » veut contribuer à l'innovation cinématographique et marquer une nouvelle étape.