Mécanique Générale

Mécanique générale is an interactive film project conceived by Thierry Guibert. Using Dziga Vertov’s film L’Homme à la caméra as both material and model, and deconstructing it completely, a new plastic structure is imagined, making the film playable. Distributed in a virtual three-dimensional space and indexed in a database, the 115,000 images of the film become manipulable. Using a video game controller, visitors traverse the “galaxy of images” and reorganize them, building a variant of the original film.

Mécanique Générale questions cinema on two levels: the device and its language. The cinematograph’s reversible projector is now simulated by a virtual machine that adds new possibilities to it: speed variation, interactivity with images, spatialization and navigation in film space. The resulting narrative mutates into a new “rhizomic” form, mixing catalog and linearity. In Mécanique Générale, film time is initially frozen. We navigate over blocks of images. These blocks, which vary in length depending on the length of the original film’s sequence shots, can be manipulated like legos. Visitors can assemble timelines at random, or by querying the search engine, which they can then view.

In this way, we can create improbable sequences from the original film, but also revisit the film according to a desired category: a character: the cameraman, a gesture: shooting. All the filmic material in “The Man with the Camera” can thus be modulated in the form of timelines. From now on, you have to move forward in the temporal construction to see the sequence activate. An original quadraphonic soundtrack is generated in real time by the visitor’s exploration.

Project page here