Christophe Schaeffer is a French multidisciplinary artist — writer, poet, visual artist, philosopher (PhD), and lighting designer. His work moves across theatre, contemporary dance, visual arts, music, and research, through a transversal exploration of perception, memory, and presence.

He has published around twenty books spanning essays, poetry, and fiction, and has received international recognition for his work in the performing arts, particularly as a lighting and stage designer. Since 2022, he has developed a body of experimental films that extends this research into cinema.

His cinematic practice is grounded in duration, slowness, and the vibration of reality, often working with extreme slow motion, long focal lengths, mobile phone cinematography, and image superimposition.

Another recurring gesture in his films consists in bringing fragments of existing cinema back into the present. These images are not quoted as references or homages. They are reactivated within a new perceptual field, where past films become contemporary again — not as memories, but as living presences circulating through the image.

Some of his films embrace a radical economy of sound — sometimes even silence — while others explore minimal acoustic writing or forms of saturation in which image and sound converge within a single perceptual field. Across these works, seeing, hearing, and feeling become porous.

His films have been presented in international festival and performance contexts, including Trente-Trente Festival (Bordeaux, 2024), where part of this body of work appeared under the title La doublure du réel. They have also circulated in experimental film festivals in Europe and abroad, while remaining closely connected to the world of live performance and contemporary creation.

Since 2024, he has been an associate artist with the contemporary music ensemble TM+, developing hybrid forms at the intersection of experimental cinema, music, and stage composition.

At the heart of his cinematic approach lies a clear position: he does not seek to produce visual concepts or retreat into hermetic abstraction. What he seeks is a cinema in which form may be radical, yet remains inhabited — by a breath, a body, a memory.

For him, there is no form without presence, and no image without echo. Cinema is not a neutral field, but a way of remaining near — of resisting abstraction emptied of life, and of sustaining a possibility of relation through rhythm, silence, matter, and breath.