Fun and Games for Everyone

“We must burn all the bridges, and transform the shock of identification into an aggressive shock. Of each film, we will make a question mark whereby the thought of the spectator will be, as the case may be, the only response, or absence of response. In short, that means war” (Serge Bard). This medium-length film documents a vernissage in a Paris gallery for Olivier Mosset, whose black-and-white canvasses provide the backdrop to an assembly of older bourgeois patrons and young hipsters, their conversations obscured by Barney Willen and Sunny Murray’s entrancing jazz score. In his efforts to create violent cinematic juxtapositions, fusing life and art, Bard sought to return cinema to zero, and found a parallel tabula rasa theme in the paintings of his confrere, Mosset. This quest for origins ultimately led them to the Maoist island of Zanzibar – a trip that was reportedly severely impeded by their nihilistic spirit. Mosset ultimately fled for the desert.