Bernard Gigounon

The Double, 6.17 min, Belgium, 2012

“Cinema, Cinema, Cinema. The three things that can make us see the world like we want to see it, the way it is and the way it can be”, Alfred Hitchcock once said. Precisely this perceptual ambiguity, the multiple layers of reality involved in the moving, time-based image, incited Bernard Gigounon to start using the video medium. Before that moment, after his studies at the Department of sculpture in Ensav-La Cambre (Brussels), he mostly made sculptures based on traditional materials like metal and wood. But even then his work was based on a fascination for the tiny, apparently trivial aspects of our everyday lives, from which he tries to draw magic and poetry. Bernard Gigounon lives and works in Brussels.

In this video piece from Bernard Gigounon, we take part in the birth of a loop, one that we might define as the life and death of the image of the American Hero. The actor, each and every time, is the killer of his own image, sometimes older, sometimes younger, often in different aesthetic contexts according to the respective filmic universe he inhabits. ‘He who lives by the gun, dies by the gun.’ The double, the döppelganger, cannot survive himself; there’s no room for two in this town.