Contemplation
On a seaside promenade in Normandy, three people lie on three identical benches facing the ocean.
Each of them looks at a mobile phone.
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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:3 minutes 5 seconds
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Country of Origin:France
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Country of Filming:France
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Shooting Format:Digital 4K
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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.
Contemplation unfolds in a simple setting: benches facing the sea on the Normandy coast. The landscape invites stillness — the open horizon, the cliffs, the slow movement of light and water.
Yet the three figures lying on the benches remain absorbed by their phones. Their bodies are present in the landscape, but their attention is elsewhere.
What interested me was this quiet paradox: a place traditionally associated with contemplation becomes a space of distraction. The gaze turns away from the horizon and folds back onto the small luminous surface of the screen.
Nearby, three sculptures also face the sea. Unlike the bodies on the benches, they remain permanently oriented toward the horizon, silently extending the question: who is truly contemplating the landscape?
Far in the distance, a solitary woman slowly walks along the promenade. Her almost imperceptible movement introduces another rhythm into the image.
The music, drawn from a work by Olivier Messiaen inspired by birdsong, reconnects the image with the rhythms of the living world — sky, sea, wind, and cliffs — while the human figures remain suspended in their own enclosed time.
Between horizon and screen, the film observes this fragile coexistence of two ways of inhabiting the world.
