Bertrand Dezoteux: Archaic Cinema and Assembled Narratives

Bertrand Dezoteux's films belong to an 'archaic' cinema that rethinks beginnings, opening to new forms without history. His work diverts assemblage toward narrative construction, asking how to create stories through assembly and under what conditions it offers new possibilities for contemporary narratives. On his website (roubaix3000.com), he archives historical documents, interviews, visual databases, scientific texts, and film excerpts, which he collects and montages into machinic ensembles. His 2008 film 'Le Corso' is a 3D animal film produced by a protocol that creates a natural environment modeled after digital space, featuring hybrid animals, mobile commercial logos, a mountain shaped like Tatlin's Tower, and Dubai's artificial island The World in a duck pond. His 2010 film 'Zaldiaren Orena' combines history and anticipation through anachronism, following a German robot searching for a mysterious horse in the Basque Country during WWII, with all images produced by the remote-controlled robot's camera. 'Roubaix 3000' (2007) uses a recorded family dinner conversation as the plot for a story set in naively futuristic architectures built in Roubaix in the 1980s, with young actors lip-syncing fragments of the dialogue. Dezoteux's assemblages redistribute nature, technology, history, and community, echoing anthropological and political reflections on species redefinition and human-nonhuman relations, particularly Donna Haraway's work.