Acciones de investigación /
Jeune femme à sa fenêtre lisant une lettre
A team of students and teachers from the EQZE have digitised Jeune femme à sa fenêtre lisant une lettre (47 min., super 8 mm) in DCP 2K, using the original film material, under the supervision of the film's director, Jean-Claude Rousseau. The movie—in whose design the scarcity of resources and the precise way in which they are used are of prime importance—is preserved in its entirety on a single roll of Kodachrome colour-reversal film. No copies (in the same or any other format) of this raw material exist in any photochemical medium, and the restoration project has therefore centred entirely on this one object.
Unlike a previous video version of the work, the new digitisation restores the original 24-frame-per-second format and the 1.37:1 aspect ratio. Following six months training in digitisation processes and research into the director's work, the students have coordinated and shared out all the different technical tasks involved. The research action was carried out in close communication with Jean-Claude Rousseau himself—one of the most important, secretive and unclassifiable figures of contemporary French cinema. To complement the assignment, the team has produced programmes and presentations of some of his other films (La Vallée Close was screened in Tabakalera in November 2018 and Les Antiquités de Rome in June 2019), translating some of the filmmaker's most significant texts and the dialogues for the subtitled Spanish version of the film.
Technical data sheet
Research team:
Jean-Claude Rousseau, Manuel Asín
Students 2018-2019:
Alfredo Ruiz, Arnau Padilla, Carlos Saldaña, Lucía Ferreyra, Unai Ruiz
Timeframe:
February 2019 - August 2019