Born in 1962 in Rabat, Marc Hurtado is an essential figure in the underground music and cinematographic scene. In 1977, with his brother Éric, he founded the experimental industrial music group Ét Donnés, which led them to collaborate with Alan Vega, Michael Gira (Swans), Gabi Delgabo (DAF), Genesis P-Orridge (Pyschic TV), Lydia Lunch … At the same time, Hurtado made a series of 8mm films on his own, before turning to digital from 2007 with Sky Earth Sky. He then shot a feature-length documentary with his brother in 2012 (Jajouka, something good is coming your way) and portraits of his friends Alan Vega and Lydia Lunch. From heart to heart is the first French work entirely devoted to his multidisciplinary work.
Written by around thirty authors, both academics, collaborators and close to the artist (such as Lydia Lunch, Romain Perrot, Marie Möör or Pascal Comelade), From heart to heart, directed by Mónica Delgado and José Sarmiento Hinojosa, is interested in all the artistic fields invested by Marc Hurtado, to better try to identify the fundamental uniqueness of his creative gesture. Filmmaker, musician, poet, performer and visual artist, Hurtado is a total artist, whose diversity of practices arises from the same vital impulse. What is revealed here in particular is the carnal and fusional relationship he maintains with cinema, as evidenced by a primitive scene to which he returned in 2017 in an interview for Desistfilm (the French translation of which is given here): 14-year-old teenager plagued by suicidal thoughts, Hurtado was given by his father the 8mm camera with which he had been filmed during his childhood in Morocco. He then projects the images onto his stomach, before refilming them on his body: “ This projection was like psychoanalysis piercing the mirror of my soul. Then I filmed the inside of my room, capturing things that represented my prison. This marvelous camera, a real magic lantern, allowed me to no longer want to die. »
As José Sarmiento Hinojosa points out, the adolescent here realizes a double transfer, “screen/body” and “camera/body”: “ Hurtado extends the camera as an extension of his hand, of his own biology, of his body which has become a receptacle of luminosity. » Filming oneself becomes the means of freeing oneself from a stifling confinement by merging with the camera and, further, with the world. From this experience, Other soft landshis first film made between 1976 and 1979, represents a “ cry in the night, the existential condition of a work to come », through which the filmmaker frees himself from his dreary daily life. Initially made up of dull shots of the claustrophobic environment of his youth (windows, walls, buildings, churches), the medium-length film at the same time opens up a liberating horizon, notably thanks to the images of nature which flood the film with light, and will soon constitute the key motif of his work. Very early on for the filmmaker, filming became the constitutive act of his being-in-the-world, a “ vital gesture » “against the feeling of being around death […] and to reintroduce life into it. ».
Dissolution
This first film paved the way for the “visual poems” filmed in 8mm of the 1980s and 1990s. Alongside Kenneth Anger and Pierre Clémenti, Hurtado established himself as a master of superimposition, which notably allowed him to melt his own face in a set of natural light phenomena. The same dynamic appears simultaneously in some of his texts, such as “Aurore” (1994): “ It’s a river that flows in my eyes/It’s the white dawn on my shoulders “. The superimposition here participates in a true metaphysical experience of the world where corporeal, filmic and natural materialities enter into resonance. He explains it himself: “ I was very afraid of filming nature, I didn’t want to observe it in a contemplative way. Filmic contemplation had to be a blind act, nature had to embrace me, dominate me, devour me, make me disappear into the abyss of the film. […] Entering nature was like entering a dance. Entering a universe where there was no longer any difference between the atoms of nature and those of my body, everything was in everything. » Thanks to superimposition, the constituent elements of the sensitive world overlap to enter into coalescence: water and earth, the micro and the macro, winter and summer meet, revealing the fundamental uniqueness that governs the ‘universe. The facial features dissolve into this fusional nature; the individual fades away to rejoin the world returned to its primordial totality, thus touching on the “ highest degree of reality » to use the title of Nicole Brenez’s article quoting Friedrich Schiller.
Creation for Hurtado thus constitutes a spiritual as well as carnal experience, an articulation that Vincent Deville analyzes in particular in his article. As such, two fundamental notions emerge throughout the reading: those ofecstasy and of trance. Art becomes a magical ritual – which is the subject of the feature film co-directed with his brother Éric, Jajouka, something good is coming your way (2012) – to abandon oneself to a limit state and make the spectator/listener experience it. Basically, it is this same research that links Hurtado’s different artistic practices. While Nicolas Ballet combines the stage performances of Étant Donnés with Dionysian trances responding to the principles of Antonin Artaud’s “Theatre of Cruelty”, Romain Perrot (musician known as VOMIR and collaborator of Hurtado) describes the process recording of the musician, where the latter raises the sound level “ beyond the reasonable levele” so that the body and the sound become one through the vibrations. Regarding Hurtado’s music, composed solo or with his brother, Perrot ends with a few lines that could just as easily apply to his cinema: ” [Sa musique], il the will create again and again, to prolong this idea that he likes, that of a certain immobility between matter and flesh, between body and spirit, as well as a certain destruction, a transparency of being which ends in sound , a total erasure in music and poetry. »
-Kingdom (1991) et Blanche (1996)
Cosmogonies
Fully mounted in “ the moment of grace of filming “, his films are open to what Hurtado calls ” magical chance “, as present in his use of superimpositions – the different images of which may have been recorded several months later – as in the sound editing of his films, which he produces ” eyes closed “. By this force which guides him during the different stages of the creative process, Hurtado maintains: “ the universe will be the director of my films and I will be the spectator. » Appropriating this lexicon of magic to describe the artist as a shaman and his works as exorcisms, spells or rites, From heart to heart often embraces a mystical approach to grasp what makes Hurtado’s cinema poetic, without obscuring the concrete inscription of his work in its relationship to technique. Elisa Arca Jarque’s analysis thus looks at the consequences that changes in recording formats had on her work, with particular emphasis on their ” light conditions “. The switch to digital in 2007 with Sky Earth Sky marks a technological turning point: “ Where previously, light impacted photons directly on the film, now a sensor transforms them into signals which are subsequently amplified “. Hurtado will then gradually abandon his favorite process of overdubbing, because for him, this only has meaning if it is similar to an alchemical act, which brings together heterogeneous elements via the photochemistry of recording – which is not the case. allows more digital editing.
The marked interest in technique, evident in the use of obsolete formats such as 8mm, Super 16, rough digital or images from video surveillance cameras, is regularly commented on to underline the filmmaker’s acute awareness. of his medium, establishing a deep affinity, similar to that of the craftsman to his tool. In this sense, Hurtado follows in the footsteps of Jean Epstein: “ Pour [Hurtado]the camera is endowed with magical virtues, a machine capable of producing new forms and images, which would have remained hidden in the domain of the unknowable and the unseen without the intervention of its mechanism. » The image is not intended to document or copy reality; the camera is not a passive and neutral receptacle, which the filmmaker reminds us by constantly showing in the image the marks of the machine (perforations in the film, iridescence of the light produced by the video, etc.). On the contrary, cinema can record and exalt underground powers that escape the human eye. Monde (2018) attests to this: filmed in a carpentry workshop, it gives a mythical dimension to this battle with matter. Blur, overexposure, underexposure and frenzy of camera movements » lead us into an abnormal sensory experience » to capture the “ high degree of molecular disorder » of the visible. “Cinemain” penetrates the fabric of reality to recompose it, inviting us to observe it with a new look and to experience it in a new way: it is the reinvention of the world made possible by an art with cosmogonic powers.
