Rouge

ROUGE is a play of light: an exploration of the way in which cinematic images are generated from light and movement, as well as the material processes that make film images visible in the first place. Shimmering emulsions, superimpositions, graininess, and scratches immediately introduce the viewer to the materiality of the medium, which is usually structured by a clear separation between what is behind and what is in front of the camera, between the director, actors, and audience. In her three-minute film, Seraina Scherini disrupts these diverse, supposedly fixed relations, along with their associated regimes of the gaze, modes of representation, and narrative structures. The setting is a bar where a woman – the filmmaker herself? – is sitting at the counter. The camera circles around her, showing her from different perspectives, before she speaks directly to the camera. In the kaleidoscopic dissolution of her status as an object, she initially dances away from the light sources above the bar before turning the lamps back on the audience like “searchlights,” thus with she herself becoming an active participant in the illumination. 

The filmmaker uses the physical and emotional power of light to shift the boundary between the viewer’s space and the cinematic space: ghostly, swaying lampshades, deliberately emphatic cuts, and a wine as thick as blood point to the specific possibilities of film – not to depict reality, but to think about and reorganize it differently. These considerations are also embedded in the production process: ROUGE was shot on color negative film, color-corrected, printed on 16mm positive film, and developed by the filmmaker herself. In doing so, Seraina establishes her connection to the tradition of experimental film, infuses it with contemporary critical content, and thus revives an aesthetic that, in times of increasingly digitally polished images, possesses something remarkably fresh and resistant. (translation: John Wojtowicz)