Bernard Joisten

“Expanded boots, vest taken in at the waist and Sailor Moon mini-skirt. Fur, velvet, nylon, acrylic or jean. Overbright colors or pastel hues, nothing is determined yet. Technological © DESIGN styled like manga heroins. Smooth, cold, hot, curved, flat, textured: objects are doted with a skin, an elastic body. [...] Night neon and music. Trendy areas or business neighborhoods, political and corporate buildings, same rhythm. Sexy City. [...] The future is no longer a commercial, it has become a style. (...) Industry devours itself alive but never dies. [...] Tradition, avant-garde, post-modernism and simulation. Photogenic. Rough, perforated, slanted © ARCHITECTURE. Ironic cathedrals, high-tech structures, fragmented elegance, mock catastrophes, custom-made cracks, large scale Lego toys, anguished fun. [...] © KYOTO. Temples. Stone gardens, near-installations”

Japan Final Flash, Bernard Joisten (1)

The movie goer selects a film from a menu, goes to the screening, buys his/her ticket, enters the movie theater and – if possible – even chooses his/her seat. But beyond this, the viewer is more often than not passive. In the end, this whole succession of active systems only leads the subject to being passive. So many efforts made for such a disappointing result... Usually this relative passivity does not prevent the subject from floating about the movie, from entering it entirely until being seized by dizziness. This passivity is under the film director’s total control, who tells us where he/she wants us to go. And we do go there, convinced of our being free and active during the whole screening. Marketing endeavors to create – quite successfully – a desire and a frustration that can only be fulfilled by watching the film. The perverse and devilish logic consists in having the viewer see a film preceded with trailers and thus be tempted to see other movies, and so on until exhaustion of the movie goer and his/her desires – which will happen before not long. No way to strike up a dialogue with this kind of cinema, even if the communion can be sincere and the adhesion flawless. Each viewer will always find what he/she was looking for: its referents, his/her resources, his/her symbols and his/her codes, his/her aesthetics of visual arts, of intimacy, of violence, of evasion, of exorcism, of sex, of insanity, of feelings, of passion, of happiness, of laughter, of tears, of self-oblivion and sometimes that of others.

Through his involvement in the fine arts), Bernard Joisten has nearly always tried to instill a close link with cinema. This contact consisted in creating junctions, bridges, analogies, and confrontations between visual arts and cinema. All of his work has always been cinema-oriented, and he has always considered the cinematic object as an achievement and a premise in visual arts.

A voracious film fiend, Bernard Joisten binges on feature films and apnea-diving into movie theaters. This unrestrained bulimia has continually fed his work, preserved – thanks to his acute judgment – from direct or indirect references to cinema. This has, step by step, drawn him closer to grabbing a video-camera. Like a recurring childhood dream one has nearly grasped and that must come true at one point. Absolutely.

Bernard Joisten’s experience as a visual artist in the 1990s is essential in this regard. He started by borrowing from others, such as in Disco in which he used images from a plate by Edward J. Muybridge or in Ovni which echoes Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and ended up conceiving mock movie posters, (Sun Shield)/Le bouclier du désert, Le bouclier du désir, 1991). He even reproduced on a curved item an image from Terry Gillian’s film, Brazil. The quest for the cinematic object as an achievement and premise in visual arts does not end here.

From 1991 onwards, Bernard Joisten will expand his research in visual arts to scenography. A setting is an installation in which the narrative and semiological elements are laid out so as to ease the viewer’s immersion into fiction, but also to trigger responses and require interventions, or even interaction from the viewer. This is the case of the settings he devised between 1991 and 1997: Enigma, House Trap, Zéro, Global Drift, Z23F and XB23...

The analogy with cinema is obvious. The setting is essential as a means to trim the exhibition space but also as a means to immerse the viewer into a fictitious proposition. Similarly, in cinema, the setting douses the viewer into a fictitious proposition, trims the film and gives actors the landmark they need to embody their character.

Bernard Joisten also relied heavily quite often on photography, often enhanced with special effects to create fictitious propositions with multiple ways in and out. Series such as Chance Detector, Pyramides or Attractions take into serious consideration the idea that the artist proposes a fictitious possibility providing the viewer the freedom to elaborate his/her own scenario. The series works somewhat similarly to a story-board.

Those images are designed, handled and laid out like narrative clues. Milestones which favor a mental and intimate path and the reconstitution of a scenario among all possible configurations. Cleo 3000 (2), a photo-story directed by Bernard Joisten in 1996, foreshadowed his soon-to-come follow through. For the first time, Bernard Joisten not only chose to use / implement visual clues of fiction, but also two characters in particular.

The still image has lived. The moving image must live. And overwhelm all the rest. Stemming from his past experiences as a visual artist, Bernard Joisten is a born-again filmmaker.

“In the land of cinema, stylistic conquests occur at an extremely slow pace” (3). From 1992 to 1995, Bernard Joisten was in charge of “Tilt”, the free cinema-oriented section in the periodical Purple Prose (4). This allowed him to complete the maturing process of his gaze and to sharpen his skills as a movie reviewer, which fed his need to make his own movies one day. For the record, “Tilt” was, among others, a way to put into perspective the narrative schemes in 2001, A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick and Blade Runner by Ridley Scott (5); the theoretic demonstration of over-exposition and under-exposition in cinema (6); the elaboration of more than forty scenarios for young filmmakers (7)... Released in 1997, the novel, Le dernier décor (The Last Setting) (8) will bring to completion his tendency to stylize image and writing and to work out narrative systems.

In 2000, Bernard Joisten directs two short-feature films, Empire and Les Aventures (The Adventures), two shooting stars with a line of fire aiming at a distant target. All the suitable clues and conditions are now brought together for Bernard Joisten to make his first film.

2000. Bernard Joisten goes to Japan for a five-month artist residency in Kyoto. It is his second trip to the land of Takeshi Kitano, Murakami Ryu, Nagasi Oshima et Yasujiro Ozu. He will return with 80 hours of rushes.

2002. Paranoia. A film by Bernard Joisten.

Paranoia: n.– [Gr. Paranoia, from para beside, beyond, and noos mind] Mental disorder characterized by delusions of persecution or grandeur, usually without hallucinations. Paranoia was formerly classified as a distinct psychosis, but is now generally treated as one of several varieties of schizophrenia or, in milder cases, of personality disorder. The paranoid person generally suffers from exaggerated self-reference, a tendency to construe independent events and acts as pertaining to him- or herself.

Does art make one paranoid?

Does cinema make one paranoid?

Undoubtedly in some cases. But we are not allowed to further discuss this interesting hypothesis and to answer these questions, so let’s drift slightly away from this definition since, though paranoia is a psychosis that cinema and literature have made into a genre, it is also a style.

Japan.
Onscreen all the signs are visible – attractive, fantastic and oppressive at the same time – of a megalopolis.

Kyoto.
Architecture, Luna Park, tarmac, concrete, glass, shop windows, brands, ideograms, logos, neon sings, grey, night, light, ads, signboards, cars, urban noises, crowd passing by, young girls... A young and pretty Japanese girl barely outside of puberty’s grasp enters a game room and grabs hold of a rifle to shoot at the screen.

Who is this young girl?
“I am an obsession, she answers. I was the girl who used to lie. To obey her owner.”

She says she likes abstract moments when she thinks about nothing. She monologues a lot because monologue is the only anchorage point within doubt, existential questions, life.

The outside is a place for action and contemplation.

The inside is a place for regeneration and epiphanies, introspect.

Her hobby: observing her fellow human beings.

She watches a lot of movies, especially American movies on television. Some shown to her by her landlord, others she chooses herself. “I understood human relationships thanks to classical filmmakers, she asserts.

She writes “BEAUTY” and then “DESIGN” on a bathroom mirror.

She claims to know who she is but cannot take advantage of it. She developed quite a peculiar way of interacting with reality. Games are her reality, just like when she shoots at a screen with a rifle. The living is here transposed to virtuality and the dead to reality. And vice versa. Beware, her “gaze is misconceived, distorted by the surrounding systems”.

In a bright electric blue tank, artificial fish are dabbling around. A little bit further, live fish are swimming in a grey-toned and moving water.

LAVALITE
Let us list all the forces at play in this work.

On the one one side, a young girl on her own, one the other side two powerful multinationals: S Corporation and Biogames.

A phone call from Biogames: “Now you’re gonna change shape.” Metamorphosis of the subject thanks to disguises and wigs. A strong hint at fetishism and all the clichés surrounding it: eroticism inherent in the clothing items, the shoes, the accessories, the situations. Masks, high-heeled shoes, platform boots, leather, stockings, steel edges.

She knows how to blend in with the crowd. Not to be spotted.

She knows how to seduce. Get spotted, indeed.

She is the prototype of an experimental program set up for a military industrial group.

She is an android).

She wrote “BEAUTY” and then “DESIGN” on a bathroom mirror. She is aware of her beauty. Even more, of her womanly and robotic wiles. No feelings, no pathos.

She is a killer.

Then there is death. “He thought I was in love with him. It’s my style. After all, one must reveal oneself one way or another.” And life lies somewhere else. “I lived in a remote place, far away from science fiction.”

S Corporation wants to get rid of her.

Will she eventually accept to leave the master?

Maybe the answer is in this word: LAVALITE.

Paranoia surprises, seduces, bewitches and even annoys. Because, despite a few obvious weaknesses – probably due to a lack of experience, extremely short deadlines, an extremely low budget and a massive amount of rushes – Bernard Joisten makes his cinematic coming of age with this movie. He managed to merge his contemporary artist gaze with his desire to create cinematic works. Revolving around a very simply constructed scenario and therefore a seemingly coherent narrative, Paranoia

At that precise point, the viewer sinks into a deadly paranoid delirium. This movie is all and a bursting up of all there is.

In this film, Bernard Joisten addresses the issues of different realities, absence, nihilism, “dehumanity” while giving a heartless and personal account of what once was and what is to come. In 1994, Bernard Joisten wrote in Tilt, speaking about several other movies, what applies best to Paranoia: he stated that this film was “loaded with the shifting seduction of a feminine role model that ultimately regulates the flesh-eating impulses) of a masculine pathology.” (9) manages to not only confuse the viewer, but disabuse him/her. We know. We think we know. And in the end we no longer know. Real. Unreal. How to know?

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1. Japan Final Flash, in “Purple Prose”, n° 12, 1997.
2. Cleo 3000, in “Purple Prose” n° 11.
3. Tilt, in “Purple Prose”, number 6, 1994.
4. Tilt, n° 1 to 8 of the periodical “Purple Prose”, 1992/1995.
5. Tilt, in “Purple Prose”, n° 3, 1993.
6. Nathalie Baye, in “Purple Prose”, n° 11, 1996.
7. Ibid.
8. Le dernier décor, Bernard Joisten, Editions de la RN7, Pougues-les-Eaux Art Center, 1997.
9. Tilt, in “Purple Prose”, n° 7, 1994.