A Research/Creation Project led by IRCAM and students from Paris 8 University.
As part of the Atelier de recherche-création (Research-Creation Workshop), Master 1 students in Cultural and Creative Industries at the Université Paris 8 Vincennes–Saint-Denis were invited to imagine audiovisual productions inspired by Anthony McCall's installation Solid Light Works, exhibited at IRCAM during the festival ManiFeste-26.
The result of a collaboration between students from the Université Paris 8, their teacher Aymeric Pichevin, and IRCAM's Cultural Outreach team, four audiovisual creations were conceived in dialogue with Anthony McCall's work. Working in groups, the students wrote, directed, and edited short films.
Dans l'angle mort
Inspired by Anthony McCall, this project turns light into a raw material. Here, the beam no longer guides: it watches, frames, and constrains. In a wordless experimental short film, anonymous bodies move under an authoritarian light, oscillating between submission, flight, and confrontation. Light becomes a tool of tension, a space where control can tip over. The work questions individual and collective reactions to a power that watches and confines.
Directed by Joséphine Lemoine, Liv Maillot and Léa Valette
Monolith
Monolith follows a protagonist wandering through the night, contemplating how lights shape the city around him. This short film explores the relationship between the individual and urban space, as that space becomes the setting for a reflection on reality. Built as a loop repeated three times, it moves through three states of consciousness. If cinema, as Anthony McCall showed, can be understood at its core as an art of light, could that light, in turn, reveal or transform our perception of reality? In Monolith, light takes center stage. It illuminates, it guides, but it also questions. In the night, a solitary, thoughtful man walks on, stops, observes. A doubt lingers: what if everything around him were merely a set, where light itself draws the line between reality and illusion?
Directed by Jules Marfing, Luna Morel, Laura Tonini-Bossi and Lucas Valencia
Original Music Lucas Valencia
Sortie de séance
Sortie de séance follows a group of friends after a film screening. Their conversation, sparked by a small, seemingly trivial detail, questions the behavior expected inside a movie theater. The film observes how these unspoken rules shape the collective experience of cinema. Shot in the style of a mockumentary, it captures the spontaneous voices of moviegoers.
Directed by Apolline Leroy, Clotilde Lesouef and Juliette Loubard
Éclairé
This short film explores how light is appropriated and instrumentalized in everyday life. The main character loses her earbuds just as she's about to take the metro, and finds herself suddenly feeling the atmosphere around her in her own body, taking the time to appreciate it. Light then becomes a guide, a reflection of her emotions.
Directed by Brittany Louis, Laura Valentina Manrique Sua and Tianai Zhan
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