Bates Productions, 2011
As a child, Raphaël Neal named his imaginary film production company Bates Productions, in tribute to the title character of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Norman Bates. More than ten years before shooting his very first film, he started to produce movie production stills…of films that only existed in his mind. Based on the principle of old lobby cards that distributors used to send to movie theatres (generally in batches of eight), most of them were made between 2001 and 2011: A Boy’s room (2001) which depicts the daily life of a lonely teenager, Doppelgänger (2007, with actors Julie-Marie Parmentier and Salim Kechiouche) which tells the story of a woman who fallsin love with two physically similar men, and in Après la vie (2011), Raphaël Neal embodies a young man who disappears to then reappear as a fisherman. Each series allows viewers to create their own story around the images.
The Bates Productions were first shown at Raphaël Neal’ssolo exhibition at the Envoy Gallery in New York in 2007 and were published in 2019 by Editions de l’Oeil.
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