Marie Losier

With her work now shown at the likes of the Cannes Film Festival, New York’s MOMA and the Berlinale, Marie Losier began by making self-financed films in New York on a 16mm Bolex . Ranging from spaghetti and cream-cake fights, to psychedelia-inspired dressing-up sessions and improvised camera effects, what started out as a pretext for filming friends swiftly turned into funny, profound and moving short-films. Marie Losier rapidly built up a reputation for herself as a unique portrait maker, whose work focusses, with the utmost sensitivity, on artists that frequently have something of the irresistible and the insolent about them, such as the avant-garde filmmakers Richard Foreman, Jackie Raynal, Guy Maddin and the Kuchar brothers, the twin filmmaker brothers prominent in the 1950’s, but also the musician Tony Conrad, or Alan Vega from the group Suicide. Distancing herself from biographical conventions, she favours dream-like staging, the humour and poetry of which brings forth unexpected images, of striking beauty and overflowing with energy. This retrospective gives audiences the opportunity to see, for the first time or once again, her short and full-length films, and also to discover a broad selection of rare films which have influenced her and to encounter some of her magnificently outlandish characters, such as Felix Kubin and April March.