Between the hypermodern wave of auteur cinema that looks, gobbles, appropriates and vomits the manners and uses of genre cinema from the 60s and 70s, a tendency that had its starting point in Tarantino’s philias and paraphilias, spreading like a contagious virus through the current cinematographic scene, few filmmakers are as honest as referential, as fresh as premeditated and as complex as direct in their aesthetic and narrative praxis -applying this last term with all the possible reservations- as the French by birth and French-Belgian by vocation duo composed by Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani. Their passion for reworking  the tropes and style characteristics of the European popular cinema from the 60s and 70s , more specifically the delirious Italian giallo , without disregarding the touches of spaghetti western and polar, goes through a profound knowledge and appreciation of itself, which crystallizes in its cinematographic reification in pure film buff fetishism, through three love declarations: AMER or the naked giallo; L’ETRANGE COULEUR DES LARMES DE TON CORPS, or the transvestite giallo, and LAISSEZ BRONZER LES CADAVRES or the spaghetti-polar. Applying the metageneric, appropriative, cerebral, purely emotional and also aesthetic tradition that since surrealists as Breton or Desnos to travel companions as Cocteau and Georges Franju, or strange suspending bridges between worlds such as Jean Rollin and Jess Franco, finds in the power of images and symbols, characters and archetypes, scenarios and film and popular literature narratives the inexhaustible inspiration for his edgy experimentation, reflection and deconstruction, as the Nouvelle Vague and Nouvelle Roman, Godard and Resnais or Robbe-Grillet and Julien Gracq did once.

That this is indeed the case is evidenced with Forzani and Cattet’s selection for their “carte blanche”. Since MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON, a fundamental and foundational piece of American experimental cinema with roots in the European surrealism, from the voodoo sorceress Maya Deren, to PROFONDO ROSSO, the cornerstone of the bloody cathedral of the giallo according to Argento, which elevates the crime and mystery pocket book to an art form. Since the disturbing LA BOUCHE DE JEAN-PIERRE, an icy immersion into the childhood dangers and the fairy tale monsters that lurk in the dark corners of reality, to BELLADONNA OF SADNESS, a psychedelic Japanese animation for adults, erotic and rebellious. All of them demonstrate the approximation of genre and popular cinema with the most daring and experimental forefront, portraying in images the alchemic axiom which reads “what is above as what it is below”, gnostic truth of extremes that meet which Cattet and Forzani transform into hypermodern and passionate narrative poems, beyond and closer to the mere retro and nostalgia.

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