Patrick Bokanowski

Patrick Bokanowski was born in 1943. From 1962 to 1966, he studied photography, optics and chemistry under the direction of Henri Dimier, a painter and scholar and specialist in optical phenomena and perspective systems. The animated films of Jean Mutschler were his first true window into cinema, and for a long time animation remained for him a kind of predilection as a privileged ground of experimentation. Patrick Bokanowski tries to make images more expressive, with more fluid forms: he collected bits of glass to try as lenses and he filmed through curved, deformed or hammered mirrors. The result not being completely convincing, he manufactured lenses with the help of specialists, and he became interested in reflective surfaces such as liquid mercury, a kind of moving mirror. His technique of reflective mirrors through which he films a completely distorted reality took a new direction in "At the Edge of the Lake." This film required manufacturing fifteen precision mirrors and shooting dozens of takes. In thirty years, Patrick Bokanowski made seven films, with no dialogue, where the music composed by his wife Michèle, occupies a dominating place. He also exhibits paintings, drawings and photographs.