Tentative à contraindre le corps à s'inscrire dans le cadre de l'image

Since 1965, the self-declared “Little master from Liege from the second half of the 20th and the first half of the 21st Century, artist of mediocrity” produces and reproduces his work, continuously underlining self-irony, failure, and the absurd. Here the challenge consists of: an ‘attempt to oblige the body to fit into the image’. The ‘subject’ – Lizène himself, hands in his pockets, dressed rather formally in black trousers and white shirt and tie walks from one edge of the frame to the other. As the camera approaches with brusque shots, his field of movement is reduced to a few steps to the left and right. The brick wall in the background reinforces the effect of the artist being imprisoned, both by physically limited space (brick wall) and the visually depicted space (the camera’s viewfinder). In his effort to make his body fit into the frame, Lizène is forced to twist himself, becoming smaller and smaller, whilst the camera moves gradually closer and closer. Bent in two, touching the grass with his hands, Lizène keeps on going back and forth, almost like a monkey, until he ‘fits into’ the image, and the viewer’s screen. In Lizène’s artistic practice, subject and object frequently exchange places (Lizène: ‘subject’ of this film, but object facing the camera, being depicted by its lense; Lizène ‘artist-subject’ creating this film, an ‘object’ representing himself, the artist:). The irony of this ‘attempt’ lays in the fact that the shrinking space is of course the result, not the cause, of cinematic intervention - in other words, it is up to the filmmaker himself to restrain his freedom of movement or not, and wanting to ‘fit oneself into the image’ is a deliberate artistic procedure.