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PRISME – Argentique du futur

The festival

Mire’s annual unmissable event since 2018, the festival PRISME – Argentique du futur highlights an inventive and engaged contemporary analog cinema interacting with other practices such as photographic, visual, sonic & performative arts.

PRISME strives to explore cinema through a multidimensional lens, whether it undertakes installation-form, linear film, cinematic performance, as well as whether it occupies a scenic or museum environment, a movie theater or even public spaces. Proto, pre, post, para cinema or expanded cinema, PRISME claims a protean cinema with endless possibilities.

Following the Bains Argentiques, international artist-run filmlab gathering organized by Mire in 2016, PRISME was born from the desire to showcase the dynamic international network Filmlabs. These fifty + structures all share the same values of solidarity, knowledge exchange, the sharing of production tools and also the idea that the appropriation of technique by artists, the hands-on approach of DIY, without being in itself a goal, nourishes the creative process.

At the heart of Mire’s mission, PRISME is a an event collectively upheld by the vital forces of the association, in its programming as well as in the organizing. PRISME is an invitation to partake collectively in aesthetic and sensory experiences.

The programming

Within each edition, the program is composed as an ensemble of which the fragments echo and interact with each other.

In opposition to a presumed inevitable obsolescence of technologies, PRISME stands by the belief that photochemical cinema, a centenary medium, holds its place in the present day, side by side with the most recent moving images technology, and hasn’t lost any of its innovative potential. What is valued above all else are ways of doing and thinking : DIY, ingenuity, re-purposing, contemplation, curiosity, political thought, activism and the list goes on….

  • The open call for films and the L.A.D. screenings

Each year, PRISME sends out an open call for films, installations and performance to the filmlabs.org network and beyond with only two criteria : the currentness of the productions and the use of the film medium (Super 8, 16 or 35mm). A telling indicator of the richness of contemporary film production, each year we are receiving more and more entries : 300+ in 2023 !

The films are selected collectively by the members of Mire and are then showed during the L.A.D. screenings of the festival. A minimum of three screenings is now necessary to keep up with the affluence of the current production !

*  « L.A.D »  or  Laboratory Aim Density is a Kodak printing control method : a standard control patch specifies densities midway between the minimum and maximum of those typically obtained for a normal camera exposure.

  • Hybrid forms : expanded & exposed cinema

To extend this aperture, PRISME summons other disciplines and practices to envision cinema in collisions and artistic dialogues which give shape to hybrid and unexpected forms eluding typology.

Each edition, an exhibit and multiple evenings of performances are organized to highlight a large definition of the term “cinema” and its expressive and formal potential. The diffusion and reception contexts are taken into account in order to create a space for conviviality, contemplation and interactions between the works, the artists and the public.

Since spring 2022, Mire is a part of the european project SPECTRAL led jointly by six artist-run filmlabs dedicated to photochemical practices with an experimental and DIY approach. Collectively, we use the term Expanded Cinematic Arts (E.C.A.) to designate the ensemble of practices we wish to encourage and develop. Within SPECTRAL, PRISME represents a space for diffusion and its program will be enriched by E.C.A. propositions, some of which will be produced during the different residency programs of the project.

See you soon at PRISME #7 !