11’05” HD-Video, Projection with sound.
With site-specific performances during the festival Vidéoforme in Clermont-Ferrand (France)
L’Ordre Intérieur shows different body doubles that seem to be caught in a mysterious, labyrinthine environment. Unable to escape, strange encounters take place while the central character wanders through the building. Then, she ends up in a waiting room filled with body doubles. The characters exchange gazes and smiles in a surreal and estranging montage. Finally, she enters an interrogation room, facing harsh questions from what seems to be an official of some kind.
The movie never explicitly clarifies the context of these actions and conversations. Instead, it suggests a Kafkaesque (or maybe even a totalitarian) society and a disobedient character that is
caught up in the bureaucratic maze of that system. As such, the movie brings up issues of the self versus the other, and more particularly of the self that is always already embedded in a reality that it co-creates, even when resisting that reality. The paradoxical entanglement of the self and the system it tries to resist becomes visible in the final scene, in which one body double expels the other from “the system”. In this instance, it remains an open question who is “the self” and who is “the other”.
About the series
The video series MÔWN looks into the narrative principles of film, investigating how sequences of seemingly unrelated images construct an imaginary fictional space and a credible narrative development. In this endeavor, MÔWN reduces film to its absolute minimum, requiring only one actress that embodies different characters while at the same time also serving as a director, a camera woman, a set designer, etc. This way, the series dissects the grammar of film, cutting away the non-essential elements of cinema (an army of actors and crew members, immense set designs, multimillion dollar budgets, a well-defined scenario). Instead, the video series leaves us with the most basic building stones of filmic illusion: a woman, her camera, montage, and a willing spectator.
The shooting of the movie scenes is also a public performance in which the audience is granted a look behind the scenes. During the site-specific performances, the audience sees how Ariane positions the camera and adjusts the lens, but also how she constantly changes costumes and hair styles to embody the different characters, using the tripod of her camera as a coat stand. This way, the performances show the process of making film with minimalistic means.
