COPENHAGEN.- Overgaden, in co-operation with CPH PIX, invites you to enter a universe where the sound of dead languages mingles with moving images. The French film director duo Nicolas Klotz and Elisabeth Perceval focus on the concept of the manhunt as a fundamental cultural theme – here illustrated via the cinema screen. This filmic and site-specific installation has arisen out of a collaboration between the directors and a number of artists, philosophers and scholars.

Manhunt is a mirror image of the two directors’ ongoing international film, Ceremony – a panoramic overview of the significance that the manhunt, consciously or unconsciously, has generated up to the present day. The focal point of both the film and the installation is the cultural history of the manhunt: the hunter and the hunted as an eternally recurrent motif. Three contiguous spaces lead the audience through a series of abstractions of the concept of the manhunt: an abandoned room, a corridor with the sounds of languages that have fallen silent, and a ”black hole” with a mosaic of clips from known and unknown films.

A collective of ideas
The installation at Overgaden has come about through a collective effort in which the two directors have co-operated with philosophers, actors and musicians, as well as with a Danish team consisting of a technician, a set designer, an architect, a photographer and a linguist. Through this partnership, a concentrate has been extracted from philosophy, art, politics and film history that simultaneously focuses on the manhunt and on cinema as a concept.

Nicolas Klotz and Elisabeth Perceval write their films in collaboration, which Klotz directs. Alongside their film work they also work in the world of theatre, and have a more than 20-year-old collaboration with the arts festival in Avignon. Elisabeth Perceval is also an actress, and performs in the couple’s own films La question humaine (2007) and La blessure (2004).