Dans l'ombre
2011 · 8m · France
Directed by Fabrice Mathieu
Genres: experimental, fantasy, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, dark, surreal
A shadow narrates its life story with its 'Wearer', a flesh-and-bone double it one day decides to eliminate - a found-footage prequel built from clips of more than fifty films.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A shadow suing for independence against its corporeal host—built from fifty films' worth of borrowed bodies—is exactly the kind of premise that makes consensus programmers sweat, and Mathieu's willingness to construct metaphysics from pure found-footage collage is gloriously unhinged.
The film's true lineage sits somewhere between Marker's essayistic montage and the structuralist appropriation cinema of the '70s, a formal conversation conducted entirely through recombined footage that rewards close viewing of its citation architecture.
The narrator's voice—that deadpan, almost bureaucratic delivery describing ontological murder—is the single tonal choice that transmutes what could be clever-clever concept art into something genuinely unsettling and alive.