Carte blanche à Paul Rothé — Rien à voir : Filmer le vide, l’absence, l’invisible

How can one film what escapes the eye? Curated by Paul Rothé, this program explores the edges of the visible through works that seek to give shape to emptiness, absence, and the imperceptible. From the spectral journey through a museified Paris in Les mains négatives by Marguerite Duras to the elusive presence evoked in Schlafsand by Elias Bötticher, each film questions the limits of perception and the sensory. This cinematic quest concludes in the darkness of a nocturnal tracking shot with Or anything at all except the dark pavement by Théodora Barat, leaving behind a fleeting imprint on the threshold of reality and illusion.

Curator’s Note:
Nothing to see — such is the promise of this carte blanche. Unless… the invisible suddenly becomes visible, absence reveals a presence, and emptiness grows immense and dense. This program could be a joke. It could be very serious. In the end, it will be whatever each viewer wishes it to be.
Over time, I have come to think of cinema as operating in negative, like the images it is made of — or, at least, was made of for a long time — revealing original colors by capturing their inverses. Like those negative handprints, the ones evoked in Marguerite Duras’ eponymous short film. This film, which opens my carte blanche, begins with an auroral visit to a museum-like Paris, awakened by the sound of a millennia-old cry: ​“I will love anyone who hears me scream,” breathes Marguerite Duras. In echo to this first and primal wandering, my program concludes with a nocturnal, silent tracking shot, where signals of light and smoke emerge to form a language (Or Anything At All Except The Dark Pavement by Théodora Barat).
Between these two films, a watchful camera, searching for the slightest trace, finds a lost city in absent gazes (Under the Lake by Thanasis Trouboukis), while Xacio Baño seeks to track down ghosts (I Can’t See You): absence, though the result of a disappearance or subtraction, becomes a point of fixation. Finally, Schlafsand gives an identity, a face, a body to a phenomenon with invisible contours. Some would call it magic. Others would name it cinema. A few, more discerning, might say that there is barely anything — if not nothing at all — between the two.
- Paul Rothé

Paul Rothé has been working in the independent cinema industry since completing a master’s degree at Sciences Po Toulouse, where he defended a research thesis titled ​“Inhabiting the New Town in Les Nuits de la Pleine Lune and L’Ami de Mon Amie by Éric Rohmer”.
After gaining experience as a film critic, script reader, and member of selection committees for festivals such as Cinéma du Réel (Première Fenêtre section), he joined the mk2 Curiosity platform as a programmer. In September 2023, he left Paris for Montreal, where he joined the Festival International du Film sur l’Art (Le FIFA). He became part of the selection committee and took charge of FIFA Connexions, the festival’s professional industry days. In 2024, his role evolves as he also becomes the programmer for the ARTS.FILM streaming platform.

Marguerite Duras – Les mains négatives (1979, France, 14’)
Thanasis Trouboukis – Under the Lake (2022, Grèce, 16’)
Xacio Baño – I Can’t See You (2023, Espagne, 14’)
Elias Bötticher – Schlafsand (2024, Suisse, 14’)
Théodora Barat – Or anything at all except the dark pavement (2011, France, 5’)