In the Eye of the Shadow Machine is a film program that suggests the research led by Elise and Marcel Florenty Turkowsky around different possible communication experiments between humans and non-humans in Japan. With this program, the artists focus specifically on Bunraku - a form of theater in which the characters are represented by large puppets, manipulated by masked and black dressed operators.
The program opens with the short movie Shadow-machine that reveals a constellation of characters, plants, animals and machines, isolated in a dense summer night, and sharing the feeling of being strangely linked to each other as they were guided by the same external force, collective and threatening. If Shadow Machine is inspired by Bunraku, it is a reflection both anxious and liberating on the domination of an author on his player.
The second film Kitsune-Bi Material enters the eye of the first one. Designed in the conspiracy of the same night, it unfolds short stories from Bunraku theater “behind the scenes”, revealing a complex narrative device that separates the music of the voice, the voice of the body, the head of the members. By distancing itself from the representation, the film observes how operators like shifting and sovereign shadows, alternately give life and take it back.