Arnold Pasquier

Being born on rue des Martyrs in Paris on 27 July 1968 doesn’t seem to have done him any harm. As a child, he was fascinated by fortified castles and aspired to become an archaeologist. His father woke him up on a Sunday morning to listen to the film-maker Jean Renoir speak on the radio, and he was used to taking long detours to see, for example, the Garabit viaduct built by Gustave Eiffel. His cinephilia is all-consuming, and he devotes a cult following to certain actresses, actors and films. In the shower, he listens to the soundtrack of Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis every day, and knows the dialogue from the first hour by heart. But it was Charlie Chaplin, at a retrospective of his films after his death, who made him want to be an actor, even before he thought of cinema as a profession.

After trying his hand at a number of sports, it was swimming that caught his fancy, and he trained regularly at regional level. The plastic arts option, which he chose to enter his second year at the lycée in Montgeron (91), provided him with some essential encounters. Three teachers – Anne-Marie Garat, Françoise Parfait and Jean-Claude Fozza – helped shape his taste for images, literature and travel. He tried his hand at costume design, first to dress himself, then to stage fashion shows. These events became opportunities to bring together his friends, his cinephilia and the arts, under the Arnold 1.2.3 brand.

In Senigallia (AN), Italy, he met the beautiful Angela, who became his inspiration, model and actress. He sewed dresses for her, wrote films for her and invited her to write a novel, Simple Period, which brought together a troupe of friends and lovers in a suburban house. Her death, sudden and staggering, turned his hopes upside down. He abandoned fashion and adapted his manuscript into a feature-length screenplay, which was later rewritten into a short film entitled Angela (1996). He discovered contemporary dance, whose performances fascinated him, and had a decisive encounter with Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater in 1988. He began to film dance, before trying his hand at it himself.

In 1997, he became a resident at Le Fresnoy, Studio national des arts contemporains in Tourcoing, where his great-grandparents met in 1921. This residency gave him the opportunity to assemble shapes, faces and bodies in a single embrace.
Over the years, and through his films, his interest in the representation of the city has grown. He explores the interactions between bodies in movement and urban space, creating presences that oscillate between representations and absences. For him, architecture becomes an inhabited stage for choreographic experiments.
He regularly works on films as a cinematographer and editor, and teaches film at art, design and architecture schools. He teaches video at the École nationale supérieure d’architecture de Paris-Belleville.