The Cinematheque

“Isolated from their communities, means of subsistence, and support structures, both nuclear families and managed forest plots reveal themselves to be deadly structures.”

Stéphanie Lagarde on Extra Life (And Decay)

Historically embedded, uncannily anachronistic, profoundly material. Paris-based Stéphanie Lagarde’s films traverse time and place to expose systems of control that attempt to delimit life’s possibilities. Déploiements, made in response to France’s anti-terrorist defence and surveillance measures following the 2015 Île-de-France attacks, is a prescient examination of the military industrial complex prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Rocky Tales of Occupation explores the corridors of Jezuietenberg—a subterranean museum carved out of limestone by Jesuit missionaries—to redress historical liberties taken by its creators. Deeper still, Minimal Sway While Starting My Way Up follows the existential musings of a sentient elevator, serving as the humble connector between mega-tower and mineral mine. Finally, Extra Life (and Decay) reestablishes proximity between subject and filmmaker, developing a formation of collective resistance that, according to Lagarde, mobilizes ​“a language of anger, the most precise political language I can own.”

Introduced by curator Casey Wei and, by video, Stéphanie Lagarde.

Déploiements
Netherlands 2018
Stéphanie Lagarde
16 min. DCP In French with English subtitles

Rocky Tales of Occupation
Netherlands 2019
Stéphanie Lagarde
15 min. DCP In English

Minimal Sway While Starting My Way Up
Netherlands 2021
Stéphanie Lagarde
16 min. DCP In English

Extra Life (and Decay)
France/​Netherlands 2025
Stéphanie Lagarde
22 min. DCP In French with English subtitles