I Want You (But I Can't)

Author: Joëlle Bitton
Year: 2006
System: Video Collage
Duration: 27 mn
Exhibition: Projected during the exhibition "Ithyphallique" at Cinema Le Barbizon, Paris (2006)

Concept: Hundreds of movies, of representations and of staged stories absorbed during the pre-adolescence and the adolescence have shaped the form of my ideal man, have slowly built and conditioned my desire and my libido.
These images have imprisoned me in a love relationship forever fantasized and unresolved. We called them “impostors” those who in the street looked like them and were as well out of reach.
Yet, between Clark Gable and Fred Astaire, there’s no meeting point: if only just the game of love played so that it transcends them both into objects of desire to take, to possess and finally to anticipate for a better self transfer.
This project consists in traveling back in time and in coming back to those moments of movies that have crystallized everything for me. This is a video collage that aims to show the mechanism of fixation and maybe to take it apart in restaging almost in a reiterated way what is at stake in the desire and the frustration.
This is the history of cinema, of pop music, of Hollywood, and of a spectator without distance.

Launch video excerpt (QT movie, 2mns, 16.5mo).
Launch exhibition "Ithyphallique" website (in French).

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