Autobrouillard (2002)

Handling

The video Autobrouillard (Auto-Fog) is a polychromatic nocturnal view of an illuminated city progressively invaded by mist. Autobrouillard, filmed using a scale model just as Hollywood movies do for special effects, adapts the themes of city-as-set and the self-managed metropolis. We immediately recognize Bertrand Lamarche’s universe: the themes and motifs (architecture, maquettes, vortices, spires, hurricanes, fog) of an artist, a monomaniacal inventor, whose workshop produces miniatures of atmospheric phenomena. He makes machines that generate processes filmed by a built-in camera. The resulting image is often a spiral ia whirlwind in Tore [1998] and Station des eaux usées [Water Station, 2002]; Autobrouillard shows two rotating movements). Autobrouillard constructs the atmosphere of a fiction in which the common reference is an ideal autarkic city.