Frame by Frame part 4 - Léo Valls

Shall we observe the dozens of reporters at La Lodge, we would realize that one of the recurrent subjects that come up during the long hours of chitchatting in front of the coffee machine is Bordeaux's finest Léo Valls's part in Frame by Frame, edited by Romain Batard. And indeed, its quite a puzzling material.
To the surprise of the average skateboarder, Léo opens his part sporting a face mask. "What does this mean?" asks the upset everyman confortably numb by the resemblance of every skateboard video these days. Well, we first thought of an affiliation with the Canadian Satan-inspired Barrier Kult, for Léo is a man of many connections. However, the hip-hopesque nature of the musical accompaniment seems to indicate that no answer can be supplied by this lead.

Perhaps we should come back to the intrinsic definition of the face mask. Face mask= clandestiness. There it is. Such an opening signals Léo's shifting to undergound. Indeed, we, in France, live in a country where the cover of a magazine is a handrail stunt 9 times out of 10. People care more about the flying backfoot of the famous contest-winning Ronald Weasley look alike than about actual creative skateboarders. Street-skateboarding is very often reduced to fair-headed pre-pubescent skaters with rolled-up pants firing 3-6 shove-its in every line. Despite the regular claims of the artisitic potential of skateboarding in magazine editos, it seems that glory still lies in normality and if one wants to shine, the panel of his tricks must not step out of the boundaries of what is traditionnally accepted as 'steezy'.


How much room is one given for innovation? Not much. Where else than in the US is one supposed to look for inspiration? Nowhere. Well, be ready my friends, because Léo's skateboarding is largely Tightbooth-inspired and some of his maneuvers will probably never find their place in the French skate-landscape notwithsanting their originality. Therefore, to come back to our point, the problematic face mask announces the ideological stand that Léo takes against normative skateboarding. His skateboarding bears neither shaking junts nor combo-slides. In other words, there is nothing to satisfy the average skater's hunger for performance, hence Léo's noctambulism. If such unorthodox skateboarding is not recognized by the mainstream, why not playing according these lines and keeping the joke running by skating at night? Thus, when the everyman gets his well-deserved rest after the session, Léo fires lines in Bordeaux's most obscure back-alleys, and never these two worlds cross each other's way.

Frame by Frame part 2 - Jo & Greg Dezecot

I shall start this essay by referring to one of the greatest French scholars of skateboarding, who saw the alliteration between Dezecot and Decenzo as a good opportunity to draw a parallel between the two pairs of brothers. Well, allow me to push the comparison slighlty further. Before entering the details of the part, I would like to point that the Dezecot Brothers' marketing department has made serious improvements over the years . I use to be able to differentiate them because (if I remember well) Greg used to be an Ipath-enthusiast who had the habit to pop his boardslides before reaching the ends of rails, while Jo used to be a relatively small fs half-cab flipper in skinny jeans. But these days are long gone, for Jo has grown up and they have now decided to bet on their resemblance to reach skateboarding-stardom, like the Decenzo brothers have done.

Consequently,and at the image of their Canadian counterparts, you can expect to seem to get big RDS or Dakine contracts and Thrasher covers in the very next future.

Moving on to their shared and self-edited part, as stupid as it might sound, the most significant weakness was that I had a really hard time differentiating them. Dead Meadow constitutes a logical musical accompanement to the commited nature of their skateboarding. I appreaciated that the amount of "pushing shots" was rather limited to let room for actual shredding.

Some of the flatground tricks and technical moves might be a little bit shaky or awkward, but that is not where the point of the part rests. Instead, the accent is put in those rough semi-urban transitions that you are likely to find if you skim through the medium-sized French towns. I personally thought that the best declension of the case was this ToddJordan-like bank to bank ollie:

More generally, the whole part is sprinked with ideally chosen tricks on hostile spots. Being a 90s enthusiast, I deplore the lack of switchstance maneuvers on ledges, though I remember a sw frontside lipslide which almost reconciled me with the blatant and excessive use of regular version of that trick. And that is a lot to say. We should also salute those two for their adaptation skills and their relative detachment from some of the worst trends in skateboarding. However, next time it would be a good idea not to have a shared part so that we might know who to give credit for each trick. I deliberately won't say whose skating aroused me the most, to make sure that each breakfast in the Dezecot family might be darkened by the doubt until the end of time. Indeed, one is always by himself at the top.

Frame by Frame - part 1

No matter what you might think about the video in itself, you cannot but take a bow in front of the people at the root of this enterprise. The release of an independent skateboard video in France is probably as historical as the passing of the health care bill in the US. We already had some but I guess it is legitimate to say that the quality of the editing had nothing to do with the job made by the guys Behind the Lens.

For those who don't know, Frame by Frame is made by a bunch of unpretentious chaps from Le Mans, Tours and Paris, aaaah Paris. [...] The concept of the video is similar to Transworld's Cinematographers or the more recent Cliché's Déja Vu. And filmer/editor for each part. An ingenious concept I would say, even though the skater (and his personality) still seems to be the one who gives its flavour to a part. I guess the concept is first of all a justification of the fact that Frame by Frame is a common enterprise.
A common project certainly, but uncommon by its nature. Before entering into the details of the protagonists' feats, we shall take a moment to celebrate the fact that they managed to avoid the most reccurents spots in the landscape of French skateboarding. [...] The most illustrious pilgrimage places of the City of Lights have been skillfully avoided in favor of more obsucre spots. Aside from Oscar's 8mm-filmed-ollie, le Dôme is let at rest. And this might be for the best, because this allow us to discover the resources that our cherished Hexagon has to offer. However, it seems these wonderful resources are going to be kept secret a little longer, because a lot of the protagonists made a point to choose the least attractive/skatebale spots.

Therefore, you can already classify Frame by Frame in the categories of videos featuring tricks that look doable until reality comes to shatter your hopes. How many times have you resolutely claimed that you were going to one up the local hero, and pathetically failed because of some unforeseen gravels or a too short runway once you were at the spot?

- I can probably do a fs flip here! I can do it first try on the skatepark's pyramid. Guys, I swear tomorrow I'm gonna do it, don't forget the camera!
And then he day after:
-Naaaaaay. You know what? This spot sucks, I bet they came with broomsticks and wooden plates to make it easier...
Well, they did not. The spot is simply harder to skate than it looks. And so are the spots in Frame by Frame, for having been to some of them.



(to be continued when willing to...)