Une montagne(s)

Une montagne(s) is a book/disc that is not a documentary restitution of artistic research but an artwork in its own right, in published form.

Starting with an iconographic survey of Paramount Mountain (the various versions of the logo), on some of the company’s emblematic films and their ramifications in the real world, this project-book delivers a visual narrative that consists of a sort of immersive trip between film studio, studio and amusement park. The documents gathered in the course of the research (photograms, postcards, reproductions of artworks, illustrations, etc., as many images that have already been put into circulation and culturally appropriated by viewers) are redrawn and give rise to a graphic composition and narrative conceived according to the logic of assembly, between visual continuities and rhythmic breaks.

These documents are progressively recounted and then returned to a state of inventory, again through the remediation of drawing. In this way, representations from the early twentieth century to the present day are blended together, and are as heterogeneous in nature as they are in their representations. Drawing makes it possible to unify these multiple sources, avoiding any fetishism and freeing us from the initial framing and scales of the documents.

Produced in black ink, first and foremost to evoke the storyboard and the graphic novel, it also builds an ambiguous relationship with comics, particularly in the vocabularies that link them to cinema. In fact, while the content of the book is entirely drawn, it actually involves a hybridisation of several languages, media and practices (drawing and comics, photography, collage, cinema), both in terms of the construction of the images as well as the narrative drives.

The disc that accompanies the book is composed by Pierre Jodlowski. It places the visual narrative in perspective with a hybrid sound environment, mixing a text written by Jérôme Dupeyrat, borrowings from various cinematographic sources, and sound materials linked to the landscapes and hypothetical reliefs through which the reader of the book passes.

Both an autonomous sound object and a sort of soundtrack of the book, the disc introduces a third dimension and borrows from both reality and fiction to define a new scenario that is compatible and freely associable with the drawings presented in the edition.