“Proxima” is a spatio-temporal loop, a search for the infinite. It is a vision, as an echo to the poem of Charles Baudelaire “The Abyss”. We are a prisoner between the two unknowns that are birth and death, in the immensity of the world, between our disproportionate impulses of Eros and Thanatos. Each second brings its share of illusions. We think we can grab the glimmer that would tell everything, explain everything. But it moves away ever more, and when it comes to rest at last, it delivers nothing of its intention, or about what would be on other side. This shirking light represent that feeling of total frustration we have, sensing that, this infinite world, we could almost grasp it. At least we have this illusion within ourselves.
But is this world real or deceptive? What is what we are looking at? “Proxima” puts in abyss cinematic VR, a technology which plunges us into a virtual sphere, in a mesh of triangles upon which moving images are mapped. Our actions trigger these images and their eternal renewal gives us the illusion of grasping a real world. With a headset over the eyes or eyes wide open out in the open, does our sight go beyond the big sphere of atmosphere in which we are immersed?
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Director: Mathieu Pradat
France, 2017
