L'éléphant s'évapore / The Elephant Vanishes

France ⎜ 16 min ⎜ Fiction expérimentale ⎜ Couleur ⎜ 5.1 Dolby Digital ⎜ Production Le Fresnoy 
2022

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L’Éléphant s’évapore questions the boundary of perception between imagination and reality, existence and disappearance, the virtual and the analogue. It is the surreal story of Chang (elephant in Thai), who forgets himself in the search for his cat,

Bye Bye.

The elephant designates images.
The Chinese philosopher Han Fei Zi, a scholar who lived in the third century B.C., remarked that “Humans rarely see a living elephant, but when they find the carcass of a dead elephant, they base themselves on this vision in order to imagine it alive.” Since then, the elephant has been used to designate anything that allows the human mind to form an idea of something, be it an emblem, symbol, or figure. Images, the intermediaries between sentient and invisible beings or symbols, are an evocation of reality.
And images are destined to disappear, just like the lost cat called Bye Bye and a robot that acts as a cat, carrying a stop sign
on a pedestrian crossing.