Du Mentir-Faux

When you say 'Jeanne d'Arc', you think of an androgynous heroine, the beautiful films by Dreyer and Bresson, a perverse game of question and answer, a tortured body, a mature symbol... What happens when an artist goes back and re-examines the historical sources with this in the back of her mind? And what kind of images could that provide? Ana Torfs shows us in Du Mentir-faux. Ana Torfs (1963) trained in communication science and visual art. She has worked with installations, photography, video and film. Her first installation, Il Combattimento, was completed in 1993, following three video-essays made with Jurgen Persijn. Her first feature film Zyklus von Kleinigkeiten (1998), was screened in the Tiger Awards Competition at Rotterdam in 1998. It explored the relation of image, sound and text through the motif of the notes that the deaf Beethoven used to communicate in his later years. Moments from the life of Beethoven's nephew were visualised in elegant black and white tableaux. The film also lead to the publication of a book of related photographs.