François Dufrêne. Tambours du jugement premier

Activity postponed until further notice.

François Dufrêne created Tambours du jugement premier (Drums of the First Judgement) in 1952, an unprecedented project he called “imagined cinema”. A film with neither image nor soundtrack, in which four performers interpret an unpredictable and wayward script. How can we re-show this film-less film, imparting it a contemporary re-reading?

This session without screenings is related to the series Guy Debord and René Viénet, from Lettrism to Situationism. Film Is Dead: If You Want, Let’s Proceed to the Debate. The Lettrists would become pioneers in taking apart the cinema device; namely, in thinking of an alternative to the cinema experience, not only foreshadowing film installations and expanded cinema, but also reconnecting the origins of the medium, when film was yet to be encoded in its dominant form. Following the precursors of Treaty on Venom and Eternity (Isidore Isou, 1951) and Anti-Concept (Gil J. Wolman, 1951), Dufrêne set forth a film that exists with none of the habitual elements, requiring the audience and the film theatre to gain meaning. Known for its scripts and a sound recording from 1973, which today is part of the Museo Reina Sofía Collection, it constitutes one of the most radical expressions of diluted cinema in action art.

With a view to re-reading the work through contemporary eyes, Gran Circo Indómito, an experimental stage laboratory with interdisciplinary members, halfway between poetry, film, theatre and performance, presents the mise en scène of François Dufrêne’s script.  

Drums of the First Judgement as Sheet Music

A film with neither film nor screen, the moon and the stars attire, imperative without deu re mal, with a chessboard in the form of a clover, a woman’s legs that cross and open, Guadalupe, Game of the Goose, legumes and an eye that blinks slowly to the right, created with the heart, with a kick, and without reason by François Dufrêne, presented on the sidelines of the 1952 Cannes Festival and produced in 2020 by Gran Circo Indómito with the non-realisation of the cat Emenoveessach, Eduard Mont de Palol, Sonia Noya and Lola Rubio after a fright, with the inspiration of Isidore Isou, Karl Jaspers, Antonin Artaud in the role of Marat, Raymond Queneau, Jean Cocteau and the German Romantic poet Novalis, who, on the other hand, are no more or no less sick and tired, and treat the representatives that attended the eruption of Vesuvius with disdain and call a revolt, like the one who makes marks simply for the pleasure of removing them, with a part that is sharp and long, and another guttural, tense and very slow, another whistling, another hard, cold, joyful, rushed, painful, whiny, heavy, quick, alive and slow, low, headlong and a swing-type allegro, moderato, crescendo, hastening, a decrescendo, slowing, eloquently, a strong and lingering gargarismo with a narrative and puerile tone that is not afraid of being irritable, even though it is only regarding a pretext and speaking for the sake of it, until the number of words in this text reach three hundred (bis):  ¡VLOUTE ETSSIVLOUTT ETSVLOUTT WHISSELVLI MATTANN MANEMOTSE ETSDANN KTOREPRIMF VLOUTE ETSSIVLOUT ETSVLOUT WHISSEL VLITZ MATS HAP SSALT HITZ! ¡ITSSEYOPSS! ODOH ONODOH KSOHODOEH, KSOHODOEH, KSOHODOH, KSOGAM KSOHODOEH, KSOHODOEH, KSOHODOE, KSOGUIM KSOGUIMM OEKSOGAMM KSOGAMOEKSOGUIM KSOGEM OEKSOGEM KSOGEMIHIGUIM (bis) HULOUMPE TULSPE LABOURRKH TOSS OVOURPE TOD WOSTRE TUVETEUL YTOD FERUIDLUIMP.     

 

Gran Circo Indómito