Jets of flame, geysers of fire. Cars, motorbikes, men and horses, so many machines and bodies fleeing, exploding disintegrating. The light nibbles the screen, giving the work a false air of a video retouched by a synthesizer. Claude Closky has taken excerpts from films, consistently choosing the final instant of the action: the explosion, the obligatory scene of the big budget movie. Some of these films could even be described as "a formal fire-works display" (1) : "This type of fragmentation typical of the clip […]- it's the jubilation of fire-works combined with the 'primitive' pleasure (one of Edison's first works showed someone breaking plates) of watching expensive things being destroyed..." And from film to film, at a period when the talk is of the crisis of narrative in the cinema, we watch a permanent escalation of special effects. Claude Closky's work organises this build-up of violence in a chain reaction where each explosion opens on to another conflagration and, in the process, loses any effect of finality or of a final sequence. We arrive directly in the paroxysm of a situation bereft of any foundation, detached from any context. The lack of differentiation of shots from one film to another is revealed. Attention swings between fascination for the explosions and the boredom of repetition. By its silence, the video takes away any effect of power that the explosions may have. A series of silent conflagrations for a non-eschatological and post-modern Apocalypse, which is expressed in a universal language: chase, explosions and stunts all have the same popular impact from Hong-Kong to Hollywood.

In one of his other works (En Avant, 1995), Claude Closky accumulated movements from a hundred action films borrowed from a video club. Here, video renews the tradition of a certain cinema, known as 'experimental', the 'pure cinema' of the 1920's, which knew how to get beyond the obligation of having something to recount.

Dominique Garrigues

(1) Laurent Jullier, L'Ecran post-moderne (a cinema of allusion and fire-works), L'Harmattan, Paris, 1997