François Hébert

François Hébert was born in Paris in 1988. After five years studying public law, he graduated from the Fémis (scriptwriting department) in 2014. Since then, he has written for cinema and contemporary art, and directed several short and medium-length films that have been selected for festivals. Informed by research in anthropology, his work centers around the notion of collapse – whether intimate or collective – and questions the place of the non-human in cinematic grammar.

 

During his year-long residency at Villa Médicis, he turned his attention to the question of therapies for dealing with collapse. Moving away from systemic observations and blinding symptoms, he had to find a body capable of accepting these tensions, these breaks, to consider this falling movement as a form of experience. He therefore decided to focus his research on the figure of art historian Aby Warburg. Interned for four years following severe psychotic attacks, it was from the walls of Dr. Binswanger’s psychiatric clinic in Kreuzlingen, , that Aby Warburg delivered his lecture on the snake ritual on April 21, 1923. This lecture – in which the madman rubs shoulders with the child, the “primitive” – retraces his trip to the New Mexico Indians and outlines the contours of a Western culture that had become sick. Still grappling with the night of reason, it was through this history of civilization told in reverse that Warburg transformed his devouring anguish into thought. François Hébert is currently working on his first feature-length film, based on this research and drawing on the animist origins of cinema.