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Outlandish: Strange Foreign Bodies

Philosopher and heart transplant recipient Jean-Luc Nancy meditates on the history and integrity of bodies: their secrets, their touching, their annihilation and strangeness, in Phillip Warnell’s short film, Outlandish: Strange Foreign Bodies (20mins, 35mm).

The film presents a number of visual and literary passages, each exploring the correlate between a textual narrative by Jean-Luc Nancy, his on screen presence, a surgical organ in search of a body and an unaccounted for, displaced invertebrate at sea.

An article on Phillip Warnell's films, Outlandish and The Girl with X-ray Eyes, by Andrea Lissoni entitled: 'The Meaning of the world outside the world', features in the current issue of 'Mousse contemporary art magazine' No. 22. Feb 2010.
Mousse

Screenings of Outlandish in 2010 include in Madrid, Berlin and Istanbul. Rencontres Internationale will present the film on two occasions:
Rencontres

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Outlandish: Strange Foreign Bodies - 35mm film, 20mins. With Jean-Luc Nancy.

'A body embodies: it isn’t a tautology. It is a subject predicating its own essence.
If the soul is the body’s form, then the body is also the soul’s impenetrability.
It is the soul’s hardness, substance, entrenchment. A soul without entrenchment,
without rampart, vanishes soulless'. Strange Foreign Bodies - JL Nancy

 

 

Outlandish:Strange Foreign Bodies - FID Marseille, July 2009

“Two dances echo each other, differ or connect: one is the dance of language, of some ongoing
thought incarnated in a body that is responsible for expressing it; and the other is the dance of a
mute animal moving about like some code’s figures, trapped in a transparent prison. Both dances
show in their own way the paths to a motionless odyssey.”
FID Director Jean-Pierre Rehm

On the deck of an abandoned fishing boat in the middle of a lonely sea an Octopus floats around in a small aquarium.
A crystal clear and unforgettable image and enigmatic metaphor for the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s thoughts
on the relationship between the body and this strange appearance, toiling away. Seated at his desk with his back
against a wall of books, Nancy speaks in eight short chapters on self corporal integrity and our illusory experience of
the impregnable bodily fortress, based on his own experiences and his writings whilst he recovered from a heart
transplant and a severe cancer. Abstract matters, yet concisely and directly corresponding with Phillip Warnell’s beautiful,
luminous images. 'Outlandish - Strange Foreign Bodies' is not only a formidable visual interpretation of the body's
renaissance in philosophy, but also a testimony to the charismatic Nancy and his intellectual fearlessness. 
CPH-Dox, Nov 2009

 

The Girl with X-ray Eyes - 35mm film, 23 mins. Photographs: Zhenia Sveshinsky

 

The world of the shadowless person
"The power of science produces a sort of reaction of subjects, an almost vital
refusal to let ourselves be reduced to its algorithms. Phillip Warnell's film about
Natasha Demkina states that subjects cannot becomprehensively calculated."
Gérard Wajcman

 

Lydia Kavina plays The Girl with X-ray Eyes
Performing a live Theremin film accompaniment composed by Vladimir Nikolaev,
June 2008. Photograph, Hana Vojackova