El origen del mundo (The origin of the world)

El origen del mundo is a short film that stages a tableau vivant of Gustave Courbet’s provocative painting of the same name. Captured in a single, continuous 10-minute take, the film centres on a model, Leila, posing to recreate the painting’s composition, while the director and crew discuss its historical censorship, the nature of the gaze, and the interplay between cinematic and painterly framing.

This film is a cinematic conjuring of Courbet’s The Origin of the World, exploring obscenity in image-making through the tension between painting’s fixed frame and cinema’s fluid out-of-frame. When AI refused to reproduce the painting — likely due to its provocative gaze rather than nudity — I chose to shoot it myself. The absence of recorded sound on set, initially a practical choice, became a way to embed the filming’s out-of-frame into the frame. Reconstructing the dialogue from memory and backstage videos, doubly mediated, allowed me to offer the painting a new off- screen space, reflecting on how cinema can exceed a static image and interrogate the act of looking.

PRODUCTION 1:
First Name Carmen Films - Jazmin Lopez
Gurruchaga 1041
1414 Caba, Argentina
Tel: +54 1137010777
E-mail: jazlope@gmail.com
Social Media: @pepapigokok - Instagram

PRESS OFFICE:
Jazmin Lopez - First Name Carmen Films
Gurruchaga 1041
1414 Caba, Argentina
Tel: +54 01137010777
E-mail: jazlope@gmail.com