Dreyfus/Méliès

Dreyfus/Méliès

2014, 9 Inkjet pigment prints on archival paper. 18cmX24cm

Evron adopts and adapts one of the earliest films ever made in this series of prints. French filmmaker George Méliès’s 1899 film The Dreyfus Affair explored a controversy that had taken place five years prior surrounding Alfred Dreyfus, a young, French, Jewish military officer, who was accused of being a German spy. The film dramatized the story of Dreyfus’s arrest, trial, and conviction in short episodes, with actors playing the scenes in theatrical sets.

Each of Evron’s nine prints captures all the frames of a single episode of the film (two of the original eleven episodes are lost) and conflates them into a single still image. The layering of more than 1500 frames creates an abstraction in which the relative stillness of the film sets retain their clarity, while the movement of the actors results in opaque, cloudy blurs. Evron compresses the unfolding of a narrative in cinematic time into the relative static immediacy of a photograph.

This work touches on Evron’s interest in exploring public perception of current events, particularly as it is shaped by the media. Strong anti-Semitism in France at the end of the nineteenth century contributed to Dreyfus’s guilt in the eyes of the public, while Méliès’s sympathetic film swayed many to a pro-Dreyfus stance.  (LR)