Cinema to Think – Presentation

13° Festival Internacional de Curtas de Belo Horizonte October 2011 Cinema para pensar

The films that make up the four programs of this exhibition allow us to go through different periods of experimental cinema and make us reflect on the potential of cinema and its uses. The set of films reflects not so much an immediate actuality, but rather important stages of the practice. Each program is proposing a particular drift. Diving in autobiographical and personal space, whether to produce narratives or keep a diary for daily observations behavior observations according to a diversity of approaches that indicates the extraordinary wealth of history and contemporary uses of the film. Analysis of the device operation and exploration of what is at stake in the power of media representations ; diving in cinematographic matter for building new modes and territories of vision.

If the filmed diary played a major role in setting up a personal cinema, elevating it to an art form, it allowed us to analyze the autobiographical production according to open narrative plots, which question the principle of linear continuity. Jonas Mekas paved the way, weaving temporalities, preceded by Marie Menken and Stan Brakhage, who had worked with their notebooks and sketches, elaborating a virtual (auto) biography. Likewise, Hollis Frampton with his f(r)ictions, close to those advocated by the Oulipo [1], has developed some uniquely coded autobiographical narratives that respond to restrictions principles and had nothing behind computer programming. These principles define the very conditions of experience and transform the projection in a process of awareness.

Program two is structured around the diary and the autobiographical project. The queer dimension is openly claimed. The development of an identity passes through the recognition and sharing of different social, political and aesthetic codes. Thus the camp dimension comes amid the recycling of the 50-60 soap series of Su Friedrich, or extracts from musicals comedies at the same epoch in Matthias Müller. Everything seems to oppose the two films : one responds to the sophisticated development of an inverted alphabet from which the narrative tells us the complex story of a girl, while the other accounts the mourning and rebirth work after the death of a friend. In both cases, a narrative is constituted, although Aus der Ferne The Memo Book refers only briefly to verbal language and written words (newspaper pages open and close the film), this is a movie in which the past is heard, as well as the experience one has of it. In turn, Sink or Swim [2] would be unthinkable without a word, without text, from this point of view, the writing of the father’s letter in a Schubert “lied” is central to condense many mnesic sources. The experience of each director manifests itself in a privileged way, where the movies are a reflective manifestation.

The return of a story or an event is through the manifestation of an identity, weakened by different events the film tells more or less explicit. Aus der Ferne illustrates this weakness using scratched, dented and literally abused super-8 images, with bodies sometimes emerging on the surface, while Sink or Swim promotes a refinement of nuance and sensuality, restricted to black and white film.

Program three explores two aspects of the production of reality in cinema. In one aspect, the capture of reality actually responds to a patient selection of a subject, of an event and its recording, it being from a single shot like in La vache qui rumine by Georges Rey or an accumulation (akin to a collection) of short sequences like in Formigas Urbanas (Urban Ants) by Edson Barrus. In both films, observation constitutes the experience of filming and viewing. The ludic dimension is not absent from Georges Rey’s film or in the coquelicots singui dance in Rose Lowder’s film. The thorough observation of the behavior of flowers, a cow, humans carrying their burdens, gives the film its forms. The second part of the program emphasizes the production of a reality through film. The analysis of the device and its components triggers every proposition. The flasher, looping and repetition are in the core of T.O.U.C.H.I.N.G or Spacy, while the return on lagged slightly overprint sequences makes Water Pulu a cosmic mediation. The three films respond to particular restrictions : a mandala for the film by Paul Sharits, who works with flasher and the repetition of a word, a sequence of straight moves, circular and parabolic with Takashi Ito, the structure of the Ladislav Galeta’s film exceeds the water-polo match. Chicago, by Jurgen Reble proposes and disposes these two aspects immersing us in the dusty image of the displacement of an elevated metro in Chicago. The film dust generated by chemical attacks in the coil generates the sound of Thomas Köner.

Program four is interested in the relations of language, history and politics. Three films use found footage to interrogate the representation of history, domestic power, the military, machismo… With Secondary Currents Peter Rose interrogates the relationship between language and spirit, entering a world of nonsense, in which the intermingling of commentary and subtitles detract from the diktat of one against the other. The film considers critically and playfully the power of the word as well as modes of significant production. Image criticism and production of meaning are put into question, thou stressing the importance of story in relation to models and impact on our behavior. Thus, Abigail Child, in Covert Action, deconstructs a series of holiday films revealing « the eroticism beyond the social » through permutations and variations of visual and sound loops. A similar strategy appears in Displaced Person by Daniel Eisenberg, who works with short loops of films from Marcel Ophuls, the incomprehensible horror of Hitler’s reality, linked in two different sound systems, a Beethoven quartet and a conference given by Levi Strauss [3]. Valie EXPORT in … Remote … Remote, in turn, relates a performance manifesting violence related to other, internalized, which we do not always see its external manifestations. Operation Double Trouble appropriates a propaganda film of the American army, defending the benefits of neo-colonialism by their so-called humanitarian interventions. Keith Sanborn deconstructed this discourse producing a kind of history of stuttering, repeating twice every film shot. Chen Chieh-Jen, in Lingchi – Echoes of the Historical Photograph, revisits the history of the representation of the Chinese people as barbarians, and their use by Westerners, from photographs made at the beginning of the twentieth century. The deconstruction of the western view is achieved through the smile of the tortured, who question the projections the West imposes on others. In this program, the deconstruction of the meaning of cinema production reveals an important tool in shaping the new media [4].

The first program concerns to the auscultated film, recycling images of backgrounds, ages, genders and a wide variety of media : 9.5 mm film, with its center punched, the ancestor of 16mm, L’opera tore perforato happily abused by Paolo Gioli, through reductions of gay porn Super 8 film, perforated by Luther Price in Sodom, or in a spoiled straight porn, with decomposed colors in The Color of Ahwesh by Peggy Love, as well as the 35mm discolored by the skillful magician Peter Tscherkassky in Instructions for A Light and Sound Machine. Numerous uses of film are examined, from advertisement to the great spectacles of Hollywood (Hoolboom), passing through an Italian western (Tscherkassky), amateur films (Gioli), incunabulum (Legrice, Hoolboom) and pornography (Ahwesh, Price). Recycling and looping are moving principles of production, in which the progressive transformations in Berlin Horse by Malcolm LeGrice, violent graphic changes or abrupt montage subvert as well as manifest aesthetics and proposed reflections on film, exemplified by the movie by Mike Hoolboom (Imitations of Life ). This is a reflection on cinema through films of all kinds, which have modeled us and made us believe in the possibility of other worlds… But in this world science fiction cinema is promising to us, is there still a place for cinema ?

YannBeauvais – translation from the French by Matthew Araujo

[1] Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, usually designated by its acronym OuLiPo, an international group of writers and mathematicians, among them Raymond Queneau, Italo Calvino, Harry Matthews and Georges Perec, who would define themselves as “rats which construct themselves the labyrinth from where they propose to get out of it”, a formula attributed to Queneau.

[2] The text of the film was published in em Screen Writtings Scrpits and Texts by Independent Filmmakers, by Scott MacDonald (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1995).

[3] See the interview of Daniel Eisenberg to Alf Bold in Millennium Film Journal n°27, Winter 1993-94 (version available online \ : mfj-online.org/journalPages/MFJ27/ABoldDEiseb.html).
[4] See Lev Manovich, Pour comprendre les nouveaux médias (Dijon, Les presses du réel, 2010).