So long Michael

∞ “So Long Michael” – Elizabeth Perceval and Nicolas Klotz, 2022


The more time sculpts the face of a human, the more the eyes inhabit the caves in which the gaze withdraws and contemplates its exit into death, the more the core of the human is revealed as inhuman—the inhuman that precedes and succeeds the human: logological, thermological, geological, of love and of an angelic delicacy.

The more cinema deepens its history and sees itself as folds, rocks, wild eyebrows, in the face of an actor, the more it passes behind cinema: in the negative, in the short strip before the film—the imageless that precedes and succeeds the images.

But when the imageless deepens, the universe sparkles: the inhuman becomes cosmological and the face can return from the land of the dead, palimpsest with an abyssal eye, giant of silence that the enigmatic has saved.

Frédéric Neyrat, “On So Long Michael


Nicolas Klotz and Elisabeth Perceval have directed 14 feature films (fiction and documentary), 40 medium-length and short films, video essays, experimental films and film installations.

Through their work, they develop a cinema in perpetual transformation, questioning the cinematographic form as well as the crisis of the modern world.

Their films have been regularly screened at international festivals, such as Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, Locarno, New York, BAFICI Buenos Aires, Toronto, San Sebastian, Jeonju, Montréal, London, FID Marseille, Cinéma du Réel, FICUNAM Mexico, and others.

Several retrospectives have been dedicated to them, in BAFICI Buenos Aires (2009), Rio de Janeiro (2014), Sao Paulo (2015), and La Cinémathèque de Montréal (2017).

From November 20th to 28th, 2021, Burning Borders, a tribute was dedicated to them with fifteen of their films by the Festival dei Popoli in Florence.

From December 2nd to January 2nd, 2022, the Centre Pompidou presented a retrospective of almost all of their filmography, three installations, and a photography exhibition: Nicolas Klotz, Elisabeth Perceval : le Cinéma en Commun.