Navigators in Trafic and at the Centre Pompidou

I contributed to Trafic's first annual almanac with a text on collecting for Navigators. Érik Bullot also discusses the film in the article that opens the journal, "Notes sur les fantômes," on filmmakers’ libraries and relations between books and cinema.

For the launch of the Trafic Almanach 2023, Navigators will be screened on 35 mm at the Centre Pompidou on Friday, January 13, 2023.

“Visually, the film evokes the pages of a book; made on 16 mm with an optical printer and a rostrum camera, it adopts the principle of the divided screen, which permits the parallel to develop, the comparison of images, and the interpretation of Keaton’s film as an allegory. Through a wealth of documentary materials, made up of photos, press clippings, film excerpts, citations, and by corroborating sources, Navigators recounts the different episodes of the deportation of the militant activists. The investigation is impressive, and attests to a didactic meticulousness that is vertiginous. […] Progressing through the film by means of citations and on-screen footnotes, one turns the pages of an album. A reading machine punctuated by title cards, intertitles, and chapter headings. […] Navigators, a concretist film-book.”

-Érik Bullot (translated from French)