The Serbian artist Nemanja Nikolić (1987) embarked on a strange journey back and forth between still and animated images in his project Double Noir, initiated in 2016. Using still images from eighteen films starring Humphrey Bogart, he drew, with white chalk on a blackboard, fragments of sequences that he photographed, before erasing them to compose a new narrative in the form of an animated film. A complex process that puts cinematographic writing itself in abyss, through drawing that has become writing…
From this cinematographic deconstruction results a film composed of cartoons playing with a disturbing virtuosity of the power of multiplication of the image: Double Noir depicts a man pursued by his double.
At the beginning of the animation, the legendary film noir actor, Humphrey Bogart, appears in a dark room. As he opens a door after footsteps have been heard and a bell has sounded, he comes face to face with his double.
Then follows a schizophrenic chase, ending with the death of one of the two protagonists before “the other” reappears in the darkness as in the first scene, which starts again as we realize that the film is on a loop. Great art that speaks volumes about the seventh art and the power of its simulacra…
DIX9 Gallery
19, rue des Filles du Calvaire, Paris III
Stéphanie Dulout