C'était hier
An old man speaks in a café to someone we never see.
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Christophe SchaefferDirector
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Christophe SchaefferWriter
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Christophe SchaefferProducer
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Project Type:Experimental
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Runtime:4 minutes 53 seconds
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Country of Origin:France
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Country of Filming:France
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Shooting Format:Digital 1920x1080
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Aspect Ratio:16:9
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Film Color:Black & White and Color
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First-time Filmmaker:No
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Student Project:No
Christophe Schaeffer is a French multidisciplinary artist — writer, poet, philosopher (PhD), visual artist, and lighting designer. His work spans theatre, contemporary dance, visual arts, music, and cinema, exploring perception, time, and the fragile boundaries between image and presence.
Since 2022, he has developed a body of experimental films extending his research into moving images. His cinematic practice revolves around duration, slowness, and the vibration of reality, often using extreme slow motion, long focal lengths, and mobile phone cinematography.
His films have been presented in international festivals and artistic contexts, and pursue a form of poetic cinema of attention, where images remain inhabited by gesture, silence, and lived experience.
C’était hier begins with a simple situation: an elderly man sitting in a café, speaking to someone we never see. In the background, a voice repeats: “c’était hier.”
What interests me is the moment when time becomes visible through the body — not as a narrative, but as a presence. The film lingers on close-ups of the man’s face and hands: aged skin, slow gestures, a body marked by time yet still inhabited. These gestures are not only remnants of the past; they belong fully to the present.
Through superimpositions, fragments from In the Mood for Love appear — glances, movements, suspended encounters. These images do not represent memory directly; they move alongside the present, as if another time were passing through it.
The film unfolds in this fragile interval: between what has been lived and what has remained incomplete. Between the persistence of memory and the weight of the present.
“C’était hier” is not only a phrase about the past. It is a way of measuring how close time remains — how what is gone continues to inhabit what is here.
