Cécile Fontaine (born 1957 in south of France) grew up in the French oversea territory
La Réunion in the Indian Ocean, before studying art both in France (1975-1979) and in Boston (1980-1986) where she started making films in 1982 after taking an evening film class at Massachussetts College of Art then registering full time at School of Museum of Fine Arts, majoring
cinema. Returned in France in 1986, she lives since then in Paris, teaching art fulltime in a primary school and making films.
Since 1982, Cécile Fontaine has made over fifty films. Her body of work is a testament to one of the most unique practices within the constellation of
experimental cinema: film conceived as collage—both painterly and cinematographic. She sees cinema as a medium to be worked in a material sense, a reservoir of images taken out of their original contexts, which she manipulates and subverts according to her own formal or semantic associations.
"Cécile Fontaine works with what can be called margins, the excluded parts of cinema, revindicating scratching, soaking, de-collage and so filmmaking passes as a primarily plastic activity, with almost no material resources, renewing at once with the first major steps of the Dadaists in their collage—principally in the works of Schwitters and especially the collage of Hannah Höch executed with a kitchen knife and the work of recycling or how to make art without having the air to have touched it." — Yann Beauvais
