Les Bains-Douches, Alençon

Colors of Fantasy takes as its starting point a typology of images: what they reveal on their surface, as well as the traces of the gaze that produced them. The film approaches these ordinary photographs as cultural objects, carrying within them specific ways of seeing, framing, and representing the world. Constructed from Kodachrome and Ektachrome slides found online, made by anonymous photographers during journeys undertaken primarily between the 1960s and the 1980s, the film reactivates a vast corpus of vernacular imagery. Originally intended to be projected within the intimacy of the home as slide shows, these photographs constitute the archive of a travel imaginary that has since been profoundly transformed, yet whose representational patterns continue to circulate today.

In this sense, Colors of Fantasy appropriates the slideshow format—a domestic technology of memory and storytelling—in order to displace its original function. Hovering between still image, animated photograph, and cinematic sequence, the film constantly oscillates between different regimes of perception. The images seem at times to recover movements they might once have contained, while simultaneously drifting away from their documentary origins. Through this collection of landscapes, interiors, street scenes, and anonymous figures, an implicit history of the Western gaze gradually emerges. The film does not seek to document the places depicted but rather to observe how they were looked at, selected, and transformed into images. Exoticism, far from appearing as an inherent quality of the photographed subjects, is revealed instead as a visual construction—a set of conventions and expectations embedded within the images themselves.

The generative algorithms used to animate these archives do not function merely as a technical procedure. They operate as a mechanism of reinterpretation, capable of extending the original gestures of the photographers while subtly distorting them. The operations intrinsic to photography—framing, composition, exposure—become overlaid with those of cinema: tracking shots, pans, camera movements, and shifts in perspective. This additional layer of simulation produces a fundamental instability of vision, as though the images were hesitating between memory and hallucination.

Gradually, a diffuse sense of strangeness takes hold. Beneath the seduction of saturated colors and the familiarity of tourist imagery, forms of dissonance begin to emerge: impossible continuities, recomposed spaces, and subtle ruptures in visual logic. The film thus progresses from the ordinary toward the uncanny, exploring how contemporary technologies can reactivate the ghosts contained within images of the past. Colors of Fantasy ultimately offers less a reflection on artificial intelligence than an archaeology of the gaze. By reanimating these photographic archives, the film interrogates the persistence of certain visual imaginaries and the ways in which simulation technologies extend, displace, or amplify the representational mechanisms from which they originally emerged.

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Ludovic Sauvage graduated from Villa Arson, Nice. His practice focuses on notions of atmosphere, affect, and temporality contained within images. He has recently exhibited at Timeshare (2025), Los Angeles; the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (2024), Paris; Tonus (2024), Paris; and Pauline Perplexe (2023), Arcueil.