Artist's book based on Philippe Terrier-Hermann's eponymous film project, produced in California with thirty American and European actors (Douglas Booth, Ashley Hinshaw, Nana Agyapong, Béatrice Rosen, Sharon Stone, Roxane Mesquida, Nicole Garcia...). A staging of reality that questions the fictionality of cinema.
“It is precisely because of these once iconic, and now hackneyed,
depictions, in fact, that we often do the things we do, are the
people we are, and move to the cities we move to. We do it not
simply to live the way people live in those films, in the roles
those cities play on film, or the roles we play in those cinematic
cities, which is its own fantasy and construction, as Thom
Andersen explains in Los Angeles Plays Itself, but to look like
the people in those films. This is what Terrier-Hermann's film
stills in The American Tetralogy – pictures based on an “imagined”
movie, a premise only plausible and intelligible, if we possess a
collective cinematic epistemology – show us. Movies, photographs,
and advertising have taught us not only what it means to
live, but what it looks like to live, for we do not so much have
inner lives anymore, as outer ones.”
Masha Tupitsyn
Philippe Terrier-Hermann (born
in 1970 in France) studied at the School of
the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1998,
he directed his first films:
Accident
Providentiel at the Rijksakademie
in Amsterdam and
Executive Partner in Tokyo. In Brussels in 2000,
he directed Marie-Ange Dutheil
in
Grégoire. He then used the Villa
Medici as the setting for
Romans in which Caterina Murino and Luisa
Ranieri made their first appearances.
In 2003 he gave Andy Gillet his first role
in
Mamonaku mon amour, shot in Japan.
Thanks to
A. Weerasethakul, he cast
Banlop Lomnoi for
The Pride
of Siam. In 2009,
The Rift, with Simon
Buret and Andy Gillet, was selected
by numerous film festivals, including
Indie Lisboa, Pantin and Hors Pistes
in Paris. Since 2000, his work has been
presented at the Busan Biennal in
Korea, the Sharjah Biennal of UAE,
Triennale of Prague,
Villa Arson in
Nice, De Appel Amsterdam, Museum
voor Fotografie in Antwerp, Centro
Reina Sofia in Madrid,
Jeu de Paume,
Pompidou Center, Grand Palais,
Centre National de la Photographie,
la Fémis and at the Cinémathèque
française in Paris. Some of his films are
part of the collection of the Pompidou
Center in Paris.
Philippe Terrier-Hermann has also published
four books including
Internationales,
Fascination & Romans,
106 beautés
japonaises and
93 beautés hollandaises.
