Michel Gondry & Pierre Bismuth

This was a short video I made for an installation that was being held at the BFI in 2009 for director Michel Gondry and the artist Michel Gondry.

The new Gallery commission at BFI Southbank is a collaboration between visual artist Pierre Bismuth and acclaimed film director Michel Gondry. For the BFI they have created a new version of The All-Seeing Eye, an installation which explores, this time in the visual arts field, the themes at the core of the feature movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, directed by Gondry and based on an original idea by Bismuth; it won the 2005 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, making Bismuth the only contemporary artist to have ever received an Oscar.

The exhibition explores one of the most successful collaborations to date between a contemporary artist and a film-maker and exemplifies how film and art are interconnected today. Like the film, The All-Seeing Eye shows subtraction as the metaphor for a world without communication and relationships. A room is stripped bare, the not immediately apparent visual erasure creating a moment of displacement in the spectator comparable to the feeling experienced when a memory is lost, despite its strength and against one's will, simply by means of time passing. The theme of memory and its erasure links The All-Seeing Eye with Eternal Sunshine..., a connection that is underlined by a television in the room playing a scene from the film throughout the piece. The subtractive process of scenery-changes, seemingly high-tech, was instead manipulated off-screen in real time while filming, an example of Bismuth and Gondry's shared fondness for special effects created by low-tech or non-digital means.