La paille
In the quiet of an afternoon, a man sits alone. As he sips his drink, the walls of the café seem to dissolve. Through a play of transparency, his memories — or perhaps his dreams — begin to take shape.
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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:6 minutes 4 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.
This film unfolds as an exploration of the porosity between physical reality and mental space. Through the everyday, almost childlike gesture of an elderly man drinking through a straw, I seek to capture the motionless journey of a consciousness gradually loosening itself from the present and evaporating into a timeless landscape.
At the heart of the film lies a visual collision between two opposing scales. On one side, the vulnerability of old age is rendered through the almost mechanical precision and slowness of an ordinary gesture; on the other, the raw, mineral vastness of nature imposes itself. Within this dispositif, the straw exceeds its function as a mere object to become an Ariadne’s thread, or an umbilical cord leading back toward childhood. It becomes the last physical link holding the old man to the tangible world, even as his mind, already released, wanders toward other horizons.
The film’s structure relies on a visual metamorphosis in which superimposition becomes the driving force of the narrative, graphically translating the confusion of times and places. Through a subtle chromatic shift, the passage from black and white into desaturated color marks the transition from the real toward the imaginary.
The film thus ends in a necessary disappearance: by leaving behind the human figure and immersing itself entirely in the desert landscape, the editing suggests a form of completion. The mind has finally crossed the mirror, inviting the viewer to cross that same threshold, where the horizon becomes, at last, the only dwelling.
