First imagined to accompany a performance by musician Jessica Moss, Particles is composed of heterogeneous fragments brought together by a work of filmic alchemy. Those familiar with Charles-André Coderre's work will recognize the approach of an art patiently developed over a dozen years. The chemical treatment of film, and its development using algae, coffee or earth, produce dense, shimmering colors of red, violet and turquoise, as if their light emanated from the things themselves.

Shot in India and Myanmar, the film draws us into a movement that interweaves images of urban traffic and car travellings, close-ups of plants and luminous abstractions. If meaning eludes us at first glance, it's because for Coderre, meaning lies in the very fusion of matter.

Gradually, the repeated images of a cricketer bowling and a cow wandering among the passers-by in a town combine to occupy the end of the film. As cricket is a sport that the Indians took from the English colonizers like spoils of war, let's imagine that the bowler's grand gestures offer us a call to both insurrection and the ignition of cinematic forms, a liberation that finds its equivalent here in the animal's unhindered movement. The meaning of Particles thus appears to be entirely contained in the celebration of the infinite arrangements of matter and living things, human and non-human alike.

 

Sylvain L'Espérance
Filmmaker