We are all images of this film
In this film by Aleksandr Balagura, Alain Fleischer, with the help of Danielle Shirman, his partner and collaborator, speaks about his art, reads a chapter of his new novel, and reluctantly comments on the Zen "Story of the Ten Oxen", which in the film becomes a Story of Ten Horses and is illustrated by way of Eadweard Muybridge's sequential stills. "WE ARE ALL IMAGES OF THIS FILM" is a paraphrase of Alain Fleischer's answer to my question, "What is an image?". Photographer, filmmaker, writer, and more - "a total artist" -, Alain Fleischer has the rare quality of seeing the world with the freshness, curiosity, and imagination of a child that explores reality by play, who sees, finds, establishes (or perhaps re-finds and re-establishes) the secret links between objects and phenomena, often invisible to the adult eye. It is precisely his constant readiness to get involved in an artistic adventure, combined with the awareness of the method, with a mature and concrete analysis of the material and the means, that allows him to create pure, unpolluted images. Images perceived at their origin, as it were "for the first Jme". The ability and talent to transform reality into art, and, vice versa, to restore to art the quality of reality, is a central feature of his work. WE ARE ALL IMAGES OF THIS FILM is the result of three meetings with Alain Fleischer, which took place in his Italian home on Lake Bracciano, where he introduced me to the various aspects of his art. I tried to find the internal links between the motifs, themes, images of his works, and to combine them in a single flow, a single current, driven by the spiritual need for creation hidden behind Fleischer's ostensible "French rationalism". For this purpose, I used motifs that are very dear to me: the Zen Story of the Ten Oxen (which in the film becomes the Story of the Ten Horses, read and commented on by Alain Fleischer at my request), and sequences based on the stills of Eadweard Muybridge. Aleksandr Balagura
