Yann Beauvais and Thomas Koener present: Des Rives, commissioned by the Georges Pompidou Centre, Paris, is both installation and performance piece, utilising electronic soundscapes and up to four movie projectors.

The Festival is delighted to welcome artists yann beauvais and Thomas Koener with their spellbinding Des Rives.

Des Rives, commissioned by the Georges Pompidou Centre, Paris, is both installation and performance piece, utilising electronic soundscapes and up to four movie projectors. A constantly evolving work, it is never the same from performance to performance. In Auckland beauvais and Koener will present Des Rives at the St James.

Yann Beauvais has been working in the field of experimental cinema since the 70s. Not only an accomplished filmmaker whose work features in collections of such institutions as New York's Museum of Modern Art, he is also an impassioned curator, programmer, teacher and figure on the European arts scene. At the beginning of the 80s, he and New Zealander Miles Kingsley McKane founded Lightcone in Paris, which was to become one of Europe's leading avant-garde filmmaking co-operatives. Under the auspices of Lightcone, beauvais has curated many programmes of experimental film for museums such as the Georges Pompidou Centre. Invited to present his work and give lectures in Europe, the USA and Asia, he is frequently absent from Paris, his home, where he still manages to assure the weekly programming of experimental film, Scratch.

Thomas Koener studied electronic music in Dortmund. His interest in focusing on the phenomenon of sound colour and in combining visual and auditory experiences led him to collaborate with visual artists and to compose soundtracks and live electronic music to accompany silent films. The Louvre Auditorium, amongst others, has commissioned him to compose several soundtracks, but Koener's sound explorations aren't confined to the cinema alone: a member of duo 'Porter Ricks', he is also fascinated by the possibilities of club culture. He has been invited to perform concerts in the USA, Japan, Australia and many countries in Europe.

Cities - sites - are a constant reference in beauvais' work, but never have they received such radical and astounding treatment as in Des Rives. New York's decomposition and deconstruction has escalated from the static reworked postcards seen in New York Long Distance (screening in the beauvais short film programme) into a fluid three-dimensionality. Three strands of film weave in and out of each other, fanning out from corner to corner of the screen. This fan suddenly transforms into a windscreen-wiper blade that sweeps the city fragments clean off screen, gone like a flow of traffic beneath an underpass, only to suddenly reappear on a screen alongside...

Spacey, trip-hoppy visual rhythms are matched by the undertow and hypnotic soundscape composed by Thomas Koner. Urban sounds, metal cacophonies of subway and blaring horns, combine with live voices, focusing attention on the personal and autobiographical elements underlying beauvais' cut-up ride through a throbbing, humming New York. The interplay of visual and aural effects, the build-up of obsessive, intense rhythms, encircles the audience, an invitation to partake in a synaesthetic experience. - SR