The Angel

The Angel

1982 << L'Ange >> Directed by Patrick Bokanowski

The climbing of an immense staircase made up of the most varied stairs. Symbolic scenes occur on different levels where characters seem to be prisoners of their deeds and of their own folly. The steep staircase leads little by little towards the zones of great light where human beings and nonhuman beings meet.

Patrick Bokanowski is a French filmmalker who makes experimental and animated films. The film The Angel (1982) is his most prominent, fascinating, and obsessive work. It is accompanied by a soundtrack made by his wife, Michèle Bokanowski, and released during 2003 on a CD album under the title L'Ange.

Bokanowski develops work between the traditional cinematographic genres: short film, experimental film, and animation. His manner of treating filmic material is his research at the frontier of optical and visual arts, always in an "in-between" to create. He calls into question the idea that cinema's essence should be to reproduce reality, that is, our habits of thinking and feeling. His films contradict the "objectivity" of photography that is solidly essential to most of the global film productions. Bokanowski's experiments, with the aim of opening cinema to other expressive possibilities – for example the "warping" of objective lenses (though he prefers the term "subjective") – testify to purely mental visions that ignore conventional representations, affecting reality, transforming, and giving the viewer of his films new perceptual adventures.