Marcelle Thirache has made dozens of direct films that combine landscape photography or elements of the natural world with paint-on-film techniques (Sycomore, 2000; Tamaris, 1999, Fenice, 2003). Thirache achieves an intriguing push-pull of documentary and subjective filmmaking impulses as her painting restructures the world she records. Although she is a film painter, Thirache claims that play of light is the most important element of her cinema: “light carves forms! Light writes on the film like (better than) a brush on canvas.” Her film Notre Dame de Boschaud (2004) paints over photographic images of an old abbey, transforming film into a fresco that is, in Thirache’s words, “unfolding in time.”