Nicolas Provost is a filmmaker and visual artist living and working in Brussels, Belgium. He studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Gent, Belgium and spent 10 years in Oslo, Norway where he first worked as an illustrator, graphic designer and art director. In the late 1990s he started making video works, which have been screened worldwide and have received awards at many international film festivals. Provost’s work is a reflection on the grammar of cinema, and the relation between visual art and the cinematic experience. Duality plays an important role; his video works often balance between the grotesque and the moving, beauty and cruelty, the emotional and the intellectual. Through the manipulation of time, codes and formal elements, Provost analyses cinematographic and narrative language; new stories are told by shifting and deconstructing existing footage. Sound is also an important element, used for rhythmic support or as an emotional guideline.

Almost everyone has seen hundreds, maybe thousands of hours of television and film footage that features crowded American cities, the streets of Manhattan, American cops, yellow New York City cabs, uniforms and ambulances. Such images have become stereotypical all over the world and are widely associated with action films, crime movies and, to a certain extent, medical drama. In Plot Point, Nicolas Provost plays with this premise; he has recorded everyday life around Times Square in New York and edited the resulting footage in such a manner that it triggers our collective memory about action and crime narrative. Plot Point shows a 15-minute, seemingly random succession of shots of crowds walking on Manhattan sidewalks; we see billboards, trucks, a choreography of police cars, while uniformed NYPD officers and random people seem to be watching each other.

According to the world community of cinema buffs, Kurosawa's film Rashomon (1951) belongs to the top ten of absolute cinema classics. This film recounts the story of a woman being raped and a man being murdered from different perspectives. The magnificent black-and-white images express the maker's vision on the narrative possibilities of film and the role and position of the experiencing, observing viewer. Particularly due to these aspects and a powerful use of simplicity, Rashomon has remained a permanent source of inspiration for filmmakers and other artists. With Papillon d'Amour and Bataille, Nicolas Provost joins the devotees. He makes use of original material with the images mirrored in the longitudinal axis, which yields a sequence of new, associative images. The characters are transformed into new life forms with miraculous capabilities that defy the laws of gravitation.

The cinematic kiss is probably one of the most archetypical images to be found in film history. It is usually a reassuring and sometimes climactic element in a movie’s storyline. Not in Nicolas Provost’s Gravity though: with stroboscopic effects, more than a dozen kissing scenes, most from stereotypical 1950s romantic dramas, are edited together and superimposed. Narrative is subverted as the kissing is isolated from its context entirely; the action slows down and flickers back and forth. Every now and then, shots from different films overlap and match; protagonists merge and diverge again a few seconds later. The sugary and dramatic soundtrack of romantic film music contrasts with the deconstructed images; together, they form a dazzling 6-minute vertigo where love becomes a passionate battle.