RVB

This narrative piece, somewhere between home movie, documentary and experimental film, was premiered as a 3 screen video installation in the Irish Cultural Centre in Paris in March 2004. Using a series of loosely connected texts and images, RVB was filmed over three years. The events take place in our home on Boulevard Barbès in the north of Paris. RVB tells three true stories: R is a murder story, V is a nature story and B is a children’s story. Each story takes a couple as its subject: René and Claire, two local shopkeepers; Vera and Igor, two Japanese nightingales; and Bo and Lotti, our twin daughters.

With support from the Département de l’Art dans la Ville (Mairie de Paris) and the Mairie du XVIIIe arrondissement, Paris.

The Installation is now part of the Arts Council of Ireland’s Permanent Collection.

RVB PDF

PHOTOS

RVB conveys a sense of urban life in a rounded novelistic way, economically conveying the open-ended intersection and progress of different levels of experience. There is nothing showy or portentous about the way it deals with the profound themes of birth, life, love, loss and death; it just sets about its task with quiet effectiveness and insight.

Aidan Dunne, The Irish Times, March 22, 2005

examines the horrible murder of Clare Koskas in the groundfloor shop of our building in September 2001

R

A Murder Story

is a story of two japanese nightingales living in the micro-environment of our apartment

V

A Nature Story

B

is the story of our twin girls, Bo and Lotti, living and growing in their own world,

A Chidren’s Story

Cleary and Connolly question themselves, and us, on the significance of the word real and on what we can legitimately define as real. RVB, their video installation from 2004, takes on this question through a pertinent choice of images, which go well beyond trivialities to explore some hidden corners of reality.

Both cinema and video art carry within them a fundamental contradiction. They are both a virtual projection of the real, using virtual images taken from the real. Is ‘cinema of the real’ (le cinéma du reel) a reproduction of the real? Is “real” what happens in our lives, or what happens on the screen?

For quite some time now, Denis Connolly and Anne Cleary have mastered the technique of mixing life with art, of mixing the real with the virtual, of making the virtual more real than the real, of making art more real than the real.

Thi Bich Doan

Past and Presence

Gandon Editions, 2007