Michèle Saint-Michel
Filmmaker, Intermedia Artist, and Poet
filmography
Films directed by experimental filmmaker Michèle Saint-Michel
Axiogenesis (2024)
Axiogenesis
Multi-Channel Film // 12min // 2024
Axiogenesis is a film and filmic multi-channel installation that immerses the viewer in a layered exploration of metaphysical optimism and existential uncertainty. The title, derived from the philosophical notion of existential optimism, sets the tone for a work that juxtaposes hope with unease. This conceptual tension is echoed throughout the installation, where chance, materiality, and embodied experience converge to challenge and engage the audience.
Central to Axiogenesis is its quantum structure, where what the viewer sees and hears is subject to randomness. A disentangled quadraphonic score and the staggered timing of videos, set at three-minute intervals, ensures that no two experiences of the work are the same. This unpredictability places the audience in an active role, requiring them to navigate the installation’s disjointed temporality and contend with its phenomenological demands. The somatic awareness exercise embedded in this setup—inviting viewers to lose and return to themselves—highlights the personal, embodied negotiation of chaos and meaning.
Axiogenesis offers no easy answers, instead presenting a delicate equilibrium between chaos and calm. It invites viewers to pause, engage, and question their place within complex quantum systems, holding space for both individual contemplation and collective accountability.
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The Quest (2024)
The Quest
Poetry Film // 5 min // 2024
Filmed in London, UK.
An unsent letter, a vinyl record, and the quiet pulse of heartbreak—THE QUEST features 27 South London artists performing subtle somatic choreographies.
This film is the start of a series of Saint-Michel's work, Amor Fati. It's also included in Saint-Michel's somatic filmmaking explorations. In spring 2024, she collaborated with London artists to capture event score-based somatic choreographies. Scores include counting heartbeats, tracing the borders in the room with the gaze, and body scanning. Artists were invited to perform the event scores on film, captured digitally and on 16mm, which was then hand processed. THE QUEST features the digital video from those exchanges. Vulnerable in the physicality of performance and in the longing for connection and veracity expressed in the letter's reading.
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The Hole (2021)
The Hole
Poetry Film // 5 min // 2021
The Hole is a poetry film by Michèle Saint-Michel, based on two poems by award-winning Armenian-Cypriot poet, Nora Nadjarian. Nadjarian narrates the film, reading her poems "The Hole" and "Digging."
The film premiered in Limassol, Cyprus at a memorial for Covid-19 victims organized by the Goethe-Institut Zypern.
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Lost Sock Collection (2019)
Lost Sock Collection
Poetry Film // 16 min // 2019
Lost Sock Collection is an experimental poetry film: a multi-sensory experience steeped in loss on every level and told through the lens of time. Lost Sock Collection was an Official Selection at the 2019 Manchester International Film Festival screening in Manchester, UK. It was also a Selection of the 2019 SHORT to the Point Film Festival in Bucharest, Romania, and others. The film received an Award of Distinction from the Academy of Interactive and Visual Artists for Art Direction.
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inhale / exhale multi-screen installation (2020)
Inhale-Exhale
Multi-Screen Installation // 3 min // 2020
The inhale / exhale film series is in conversation with the work of film diarist Anne Charlotte Robertson and the self-portraits of artist Eleanor Antin. When played together, the main figure flits from screen to screen in a dizzying choreography, existing everywhere and nowhere. Music composed by Sam Carr and Dr. Sophie Stone. The films were Screened at the Great Wave Festival in Berlin, Germany in 2020.
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Don’t Tell Me I’m Beautiful (2018)
Don’t Tell Me I’m Beautiful
Poetry Film // 2 min // 2018
Filmed in Montenegro, Romania, and the U.S., Don’t Tell Me I’m Beautiful is a poetry film made for the poem of the same name. Don’t Tell Me I’m Beautiful was chosen as an Official Selection at the 2018 Juteback Poetry Film Festival. The film was chosen again as an Official Section of the 2019 All Together Now Festival of Fine Art and Short Film in Detroit, Michigan, an Official Selection at the Newlyn International Film Festival in Cornwall, England, and was again named an Official Selection at the 2019 Lincoln Short Film Festival in collaboration with the Cube Art Project. The film was also chosen to be Screened by Seattle’s Arts in Nature Festival and by Ohio’s Findlay University multimedia wing, both in the US.
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21 Scores for Losing Yourself in a Body (2024)
21 Scores for Losing Yourself in a Body
Somatic Film // 6 min // 2024
London artists perform a series of somatic choreographies. The focus on interiority and embodied experiences creates a palimpsest for the scores we keep in our bodies. Hand-processed, 16mm film superimposed over a single shot of the London sky.
21 Scores for Losing Yourself in a Body is an invitation to explore subtle shifts in attention and somatic experiencing. Often barely perceptible, these nuances pass over faces and behind eyes as the scores' instructions subtly guide the body. The scores, inspired by Fluxus, include tasks like counting heartbeats, visually tracing the edges of the room, and a favourite: tying a cherry stem into a knot with your mouth.
As we attempt to decipher the movements on screen, the film carves out a space for profound unknowing, allowing the experience to resonate beyond conventional understanding.
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In danger, the sea-cucumber divides itself in two (2023)
In danger, the sea-cucumber divides itself in two
Silent Film // 9 min // 2023
To defend against predators, the holothurian (or sea-cucumber) ejects its intestines and makes a rapid exit. This is the moment of fight or flight (fawn or freeze) recreated for this work. In these mere fractioned moments, we are irrevocably divided into blissful ignorance and a haunting seed of knowledge that forever rests heavy in our guts. We are divided into a before and an after. As Wisława Szymborska writes, we are divided “into flesh and a broken whisper.” This film premiered at Hypha Studios in Stratford, London E20 as part of Loess Collective’s show 'Taste the Difference' in February 2023.
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21 Scores for Losing Yourself in a Body [B-Side]
Somatic Film // 12 min // 2024
16mm, hand-processed B&W film, digitally scanned with digital HD video; Stereo sound; Colour; 11m41s. B-Side to the installation film of the same name for Goldsmiths 2024 MA Artists' Film & Moving Image Degree Show.
The event scores in 21 Scores for Losing Yourself in a Body are an invitation to explore interiority and somatic experiencing. Mostly undetectable to viewers, these subtle drifts in attention pass over faces and behind eyes as the instructions of the score overtake the body. The scores, constructed in the Fluxus style, include counting heartbeats, tracing the edges of the room visually, and (my favourite) tying a cherry stem into a knot using only your mouth.
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On Shawano Lake (2021)
On Shawano Lake
Poetry Film // 3 min // 2021
On Shawano Lake is a poetry film by Michèle Saint-Michel. The film is based on the poem of the same name by American poet Lora Keller.
The film plays with the horizontal line, representing the horizon where the water meets the sky and the shoreline that divides the water from the land. We journey into color and fragmentation in the style of color field paintings.
The film shifts tonally to the surreal when the speaker mentions imagination. A pattern of triplicates plays on the three children in the poem and on the classic children’s circular rhyming song, "Row row row your boat" that's often sung as a round.
Keller narrates the film.
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the abyss welcomes us (2021)
the abyss welcomes us from Abyss Triptych Tri-Screen Installation
Digital Film // 2021
Premiering as an Official Selection at the Cadence Poetry Film Festival in Seattle, Washington in April 2021. Abyss Triptych is an experimental, tri-screen film work and includes the abyss welcomes us, the abyss doesnt divide us, and the abyss surrounds us. The latter two films Screened as individual works for the Great Wave Festival in 2020. Music for the work was created as a collaboration with two experimental musicians, Camilo Brun and Greg Nieuwsma. The films express a Melvillian sense of much activity without substantial progress, traveling in four dimensions of Anthropocene and Glitch feminism.
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Return of the Unchartable Soul (2019
Return of the Unchartable Soul
Poetry Film // 2019
Filmed on the shores of Montenegro, the skies over Serbia, and across the waters of Thailand, Return of the Unchartable Soul layers related and unrelated sounds to create a disconnected new world. Sloshy and watery, Return of the Unchartable Soul is a film of leaving and returning. The film was selected as a Semi-Finalist at the Cadence Poetry Film Festival in Seattle, Washington, and premiered worldwide at a special Screening by the Paris School of Art and Culture in 2019 in Paris, France.
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Vile Figs (2021)
Vile Figs
Poetry Film // 3 min // 2021
Vile Figs is a poetry film based on the British poet, Luke Kennard's poem of the same name. On its face this poem considers our complicated relationship with technology and surveillance. More deeply, the work explores notions of belonging and care. At the heart center is the astounding question: is there a point where we stop extending compassion? Kennard narrates the film.
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The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (2021)
The Lovesong of J Alfred Prufrock
Poetry Film // 11 min // 2021
Poetry film featuring T.S. Eliot's "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock." The idea to revisit Eliot's "Prufrock" came after hearing Claudia Rankine mention a line from the poem in an interview she did for her latest book, Just Us: An American Conversation (September 2020). Rankine's book explores how contemporary America finds itself, at home and in government, riven by a culture war in which aggression and defensiveness are on the rise. Rankine urges all Americans to begin dialogue with one another to explore the issues of white supremacy, race, and white privilege.
Eliot's line, "Should I, after tea and cake and ices, / Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?" highlighted by Rankine, mirrors the situation many Americans find ourselves in currently: forcing the subject and practicing the delicate diplomacy of disabuse.
The original visual structure of the film included ~44 layers (One for every week since lockdown in March 2020.) and nods to Christian Marclay's "48 War Movies." The film's footage was taken almost exclusively during the 2020 Pandemic lockdown in addition to archival, home movie footage.
After we passed the year marker, the film was recut to underscore the feelings of restriction and the practice of self-restraint we now have the obligation to continue.
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School of Life (2018)
School of Life
Poetry film // 2018
Filmed in the Netherlands, U.S.
School of Life is a visual love letter to Amsterdam. It explores womanhood and how we might best learn life’s lessons.
School of Life was named an Official Selection at the 2018 Miniature Film Festival in Vancouver, Canada.
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Homesickness (2019)
Homesickness
Poetry Film // 2019
Filmed in Thailand, Italy, Montenegro, Romania, and the U.S., Homesickness is a poetry film that presents the longing many have for someplace to call home. "The soul which has no fixed purpose in life is lost; to be everywhere, is to be nowhere." –Michel de Montaigne.
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Each Memory is a Room (2022)
Each Memory is a Room
Poetry Film // 11 min // 2022
A slow-cinema approach to poetry film. The viewer is at once in a room with an opaque window and looking down at a window ledge at a fly preening itself in the early morning hours. We hear birdsong and traffic. Saint-Michel reads her poem, “It's So Hard to Tell Who's Going to Love You the Best by Karen Dalton (1969).” Perceived time slows as the viewer waits for the fly to take flight.
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PTSD Suite
Experimental Documentary Film Series // 2020
The PTSD Suite is a collection of films exploring the symptoms and lived experience of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Using archival footage with layered nature footage and borrowing a narrative storytelling approach from director Lizzie Borden, these films feature vignettes, allegories, poetry, and sometimes dictionary entries, to create a liminal world where the center of many Venn diagrams overlap. The films have Screened at the Great Wave Festival in Berlin, Germany and 35+ international satellite locations. Startle Response was an Official Selection at the 2021 Prismatic Ground Experimental Documentary Festival at Maysles Documentary Center in NYC, and Hypervigilance was selected to screen at Bilbao, Spain's BIODIDROME, Trouble Sleeping was an Official Selection at Mexico City's Fisura Festival of Experimental Film.
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Interior (2020)
Interior: an Exquisite Corpse film
Exquisite Corpse-style, Collaborative film // 2020
Interior: an Exquisite Corpse film (more), a collaborative project initiated by artist Sapphire Goss during the COVID-19 lockdown. Taking inspiration from the surrealist exquisite corpse method, each contributor would see the last few seconds of the previous film in the sequence and continue in their own way on the theme of Interior. The film was Screened and featured by the UK-based magazine Moving Image Artists and the Strangelove Moving Image Festival in Kent, UK.
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Transmettre (2021)
Transmettre
Micro-Short Film // 0m20s // 2021
Transmettre, created specifically for the 2020 In 20 seconds artists’ call from Dérapage, is an experimental, non-narrative work exploring connection, transmission, and quantum entanglement. The piece attempts, by the force of its atmospheres, to make viewers see with new eyes the year that sculpted the “Before times” from the ether. The film was named an Official Selection of the Dérapage Film Festival, screening May 2021.
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