Gaze
In a café, a man describes what he sees: a woman from behind, a bag, a glimpse of skin, a movement.
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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:7 minutes 39 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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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.
Gaze is built on a simple situation: a man in a café observes a woman sitting nearby. He begins to describe what he sees — her posture, the movement of her hair, fragments of her body.
Yet the film never shows what he describes.
The text by the poet Alain Roussel appears in the image as a graphic score, guiding the rhythm of the film. Words become the place where perception unfolds, where desire and imagination slowly construct a presence that remains partly invisible.
What interested me was this gap between language and image. The gaze does not reveal the world directly; it invents it. From the simple appearance of a figure seen from behind, an entire inner landscape begins to form.
The film explores that fragile moment when seeing is already imagining.
