Fantôme(2002)

Xavier Baert works on the visual outline of the body. He creates cinematographic body states which according to the French filmmaker, only cinema can invent. Ghost plays on projection and light phenomenon, on the double exposure of a body on another. The narration which is essential through a slow temporal flood comes within a progression which plays on the working drawing and fading. A ‘ghostly’ fading as it is more a question of the appearance of a body without substance through shadow effects and light loops. The image cast in negative adds to this ethereal space the sensation of unreal space, which however, forms one body with the presence of this shadow in perpetual movement. Fantome reminds us that cinema’s main rights are ‘recording bodies.