“I also made a little film that I paid for through my work as a photographer: Even stilte (A Moment’s Silence). In it, I tried to extract meaning out of almost nothing, a kind of little painting of the city of Amsterdam. What was most exciting about it for me was a scene in which you see a boy on his own, playing basketball on a foggy town square. There is no dramatic development at all. It was an attempt to capture a length of time. I found it stimulating to see, the third time the scene was repeated, how the boy’s movements, despite the fact that they were still exactly the same, began to take on an unreal quality, because of their being repetition, their placement in the space, the emphasis that the repetition gives it, as well as the sound, which is also repeated.” (JVDK)

“Il est préférable de ne pas savoir.
Le peu qu’on découvre doit rester caché.”
(Jean-Claude Rousseau)

Jean-Claude Rousseau is een van de meest onconventionele strijders binnen de Franse cinema. Zijn meestal korte films zetten in op de essentie van cinema: ruimte, tijd en beweging. Hij is een filmmaker die gelooft in de natuurlijke kracht van beelden. “Zonder de gebruikelijke systematiek en vorm van de structurele cinema over te nemen, brengt Rousseau ons simpele beelden en laat het daarbij. Hij houdt het beeld in toom. Een minimalistische en ascetische expressie van cinema: ‘a shot that lasts’.” (Prosper Hillairet)

“In this haunting coming-of-age tale that its director Charles Burnett has described as a “kind of allegory of the South,” an African American boy gently tends to a horse that is to be shot as a group of white men passively look on. Burnett artfully employs a sparse lyricism, juxtaposing the stillness of the rural setting against the disquiet imbued by the impending violence.” (Mark Quigley)

“An image as a colour and a colour as a landscape, as they exist. At night, I wander through the streets, in search of resemblances, in the faces and the bodies of others. For whom do I close my eyes at night? A phantom image, a single face that is not there. I show a world that is not mine, that is not real. The image carries my words, words that are eroded. What can I tell, close to the places that I do not show you?” (MC)