Pierre Bismuth
Artist/Writer
Pierre Bismuth is a contemporary artist and writer whose work has been displayed in galleries from New York to London. In 2004 he co-wrote the screenplay for Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for which he received the Academy Award for best original screenplay.
Q1 Which one film would you wish to share with future generations?
There are two options. On the one hand I’m interested in the history of film techniques and technology, so I would share traces of the origins of cinema, the very first films and the machines that produced them. I find it always very inspiring to look at things done by Muybridge, Louis le Prince, the Lumière Brothers, Edison, the first fictions by Méliès etc.
On the other hand I would have also an inclination to share what won’t stay in history, I mean the B movies. All those films that are not considered important are often interesting to watch because they are exempt from commentaries and history; they are full of untapped potential.
Q2 What excites you about the future of the moving image?
With digital technology we have entered into a transitional period in the history of the moving image. Put simply, one could say that digital technology has made us exit the domain of photography. Cinema’s no longer a matter of recording reality but of the pure creation of a synthetic image. In a way, we are returning to painting, but today we’re making animated paintings, and I think that what excites people today is imaginative possibilities opened up by technology. Personally, I’m not so interested in that, since I don’t have a lot of imagination and am always surprised by what reality produces, but I believe that the future of cinema will be the synthetic moving image.