Month: February 2011

ARTIST IN FOCUS: Robert Fenz
In the context of the Courtisane Festival 2011 (Gent, March 30 – April 3 2011)

Robert Fenz (1969, Ann Arbor, Michigan) is one of the most singular and committed filmmakers breathing new life to avant-garde film traditions today. Fenz’s films, mostly shot in black and white 16mm, have a rare energy and restless beauty that recalls both the jazz-inspired imagery of New York School photographers such as Roy DeCarava, but also the landscape films of one of Fenz’s former teachers, Peter Hutton, and the documentary work of Johan van der Keuken and Chantal Akerman, some of whose recent film works have actually been shot by Fenz himself. His films are personal and poetic portraits of people and places he encountered during his many travels in countries such as in Cuba, Mexico, Brazil and India. “Though they can be viewed as non-fiction works, objectivity is not one of their pretences. Images not words are central and the primary means by which their ideas are articulated. In each case, meaning is determined by three factors, ‘intention, circumstance and chance’ ingredients filmmaker Robert Gardner describes as central to the making of a non-fiction film.” Fenz’s attitude towards filmmaking has also been greatly influenced by jazz improvisation, especially by the work of trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, under whom he studied. “Studying music with Leo reinforced my belief that I needed to go into the world with an idea – do research on a subject and arrive at a place where I would be prepared to adapt and change the film completely, in the moment”. The most celebrated result of this approach is Meditations on Revolution, a series of five films made over seven years (1997-2003), exploring the basic theme of revolution in its purest qualities: the revolution inscribed in rural and urban spaces, steeped in hollowed and smiling faces, dancing on the rhythms of a world in constant transition. Robert Fenz has just completed one new film which will have its European premiere at the festival: The Sole of the Foot.

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SCREENING-PERFORMANCE
Robert Fenz / Wadada Leo Smith
Kunstencentrum Vooruit, FRI 01.04.2011, 20:30

The paths of Robert Fenz and trumpeter/composer Wadada Leo Smith (1941, Leland, Mississippi) crossed ways for the first time when Fenz decided to study musical improvisation at the California Institute of the Arts. The lessons he received from Leo Smith who teaches “African-American improvisation music” there still resonate today in the films of Robert Fenz. Smith’s influential ideas go beyond the strictly musical: what matters most is the creative and subjective exploration of connections between colour and rhythm, sound and space, texture and style. It’s a philosophy that he developped in the 1960s when, together with Anthony Braxton, Leroy Jenkins and other members of the ‘Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians’ (AACM), he transferred the focus of the American Free Jazz to an outspoken intellectual research on music as language and system. Smith introduced at the time the concept of “rhythm units”, which would be later formalised as a graphic notation system known as the “Ankhrasmation”. “I was never interested in metrical or harmonic progression. I always looked at how you make music without all those things everybody has inherited.” It’s this singularity that has established him as one of the most respected musicians of his generation and has led to affinities with Cecil Taylor, Marion Brown and many others. With his unique, lyrical form of phrasing in which what can’t be heard is as important as what is heard, he has left an indelible and unmistakable mark on the jazz music of the past decades. This performance offers a unique chance to see him at work in one of his favourite settings, the combination of an orchestration of light with a new dimension of sound.

The Sole of the Foot
US, 2011, 16mm, colour, sound, 34’

ubiety [juːˈbaɪɪtɪ]
n the condition of being in a particular place
[from Latin ubī where + -ety, on the model of society]

Origin of the English word “PLACE”:
“Middle English, from Anglo-French, open space, from Latin platea meaning broad street, from Greek plateia (hodos), from feminine of platys broad, flat; akin to Sanskrit prthu broad, Latin planta sole of the foot. Latin planta sole of the foot is ultimately from an Indo-European word meaning ‘to spread,’ which is also the ancestor of the English word place. [Pre-12th century. – Latin plantare ‘plant in the ground’ – planta ’sole of the foot’]”

“Borders (and all the politics attending the drawing of borders) exist to keep some people in (citizenship) and others out. This film is an attempt to capture the presence of people otherwise denied the political right to be at home in some place that is their home, where they have their roots, where they have their being…. (Palestinians and Israelis; North Africans in France, Cubans on the island of Cuba (their right to rule themselves denied by foreign powers).” (RF)

Meditations on Revolution
Part I: Lonely Planet
US, 1997, 16mm, b/w, silent, 12’
Part II: The Space in Between
US, 1997, 16mm, b/w, silent, 8’
Part III: Soledad
US, 2001, 16mm, b/w, silent, 14’
Part IV: Greenville, MS
US, 2003, 16mm, b/w, silent, 29’

The first four films of series of five (the last one will be screened on Saturday) in which Fenz searches for the meaning and the resonance of the word “revolution” in Cuba, Brazil, Mexico and the Mississippi. “How can it be that this myth, that the entire history of the 20th century should have eliminated, hasn’t lost its power of evocation? (…) The revolution carries in itself the tireless influence of dreams, ideals and struggle. The films of Robert Fenz can never be subject to the principles of static analysis: their potential of subversion is always at work. However some traits are common to his entire oeuvre: the critical conscience, the political engagement (which differs from militantism), the desire to know what the shadows withhold, the passion for the other. Fenz reaffirms these prominent traits of his artistic humanist heritage innovating in the construction of a visual sensitivity which opens up elemental questions of idealism from concrete, sensitive and physical observation. Following the path of rhythm, creative improvisation and kinetic description, his cinematographic oeuvre develops a style that is founded on a profound faith on the power of the image – as a source of communication, as a critical tool, as an interior necessity.” (Gabriella Trujillo)

Crossings
US, 2006/07, 16mm, colour, sound, 10’

“Crossings is an abstract portrait of the border wall. Both sides are confronted. The film is a short installment on a larger project that investigates insularity in both geographical and cultural terms. It isalso my short reflection on From the Other Side, a film I worked on in 2002 by Chantal Akerman (filmed at the United States- Mexico border).” (RF)

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SCREENINGS
FILM-PLATEAU, Sat 02.04.2010, 20:30

Robert Fenz
Meditations on Revolution, Part V: Foreign City
US, 2003, 16mm, b/w, sound, 32’

The final film in Fenz’s series Meditations on Revolution. Dedicated to the director’s father, who immigrated to the United States after WWII and died in 1999. Foreign City studies New York as a place of immigration and displacement. Using abstract black and white images and actual city sounds which come in and out of synch, Fenz creates a magical foreign landscape in which the city is reconstructed through an imaginary plan, built on sensation. At the film’s center is a monologue by recently deceased artist-musician Marion Brown 11931-2010), whose proud, fatigued monologue fuses with haunting imagery of an alienating landscape.

Ken Jacobs
Perfect Film
US, 1986, 16mm, b/w, English spoken, 22’

The rushes of a news report on the assassination of Malcolm X, just as they were found on a bin. “A lot of film is perfect left alone, perfectly revealing in its un- or semi-conscious form. I wish more stuff was available in its raw state, as primary source material for anyone to consider, and to leave for others in just that way, the evidence uncontaminated by compulsive proprietary misapplied artistry, ‘editing,’ the purposeful ‘pointing things out’ that cuts a road straight and narrow through the cine-jungle, we barrel through thinking we’re going somewhere and miss it all.” (KJ)

Johan Van der Keuken
Vakantie van de Filmer (Filmmakers Holiday)
NL, 1974, 16mm, colour, Dutch spoken, English subs, 38’

“In a small, depopulated village of the Aude province of France, an elderly couple confides to the ‘vacationer’s camera their memories of the past: war, illness, death… 
The film is put together as a collection of autonomous images which, once combined, make up van der Keuken’s mental universe: family happiness, fragments of some of his earlier films, a homage to the saxophonist Ben Webster, two poems by the great contemporary poets Remco Campert and Lucebert, a portrait of the director’s grandfather, who taught him photography at the age of twelve… One of those small masterpieces one encounters by surprise…” (Jean-Paul Fargier)

22:30 ROBERT FENZ SELECTION PART 2

Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet
Trop tôt, trop tard (too early, too late)
FR, 16mm, colour, French spoken, English subs, 1981, 105’

“Opening upon one of the most memorable shots ever filmed, Trop tôt, trop tard is an essay on the often tentative, yet urgent conditions of revolution. Shot in France and Egypt, the film employs a diptych structure as it attempts to (quite literally) catch the wind of past revolutions, using the writings of Friedrich Engels and Mahmoud Hussein. Shooting first in the busy roundabout of Paris’s storied Place de la Bastille, then in the outlying countryside where the seeds of revolution were once sewn, Straub and Huillet describe how the French peasants revolted ‘too early’ and succeeded ‘too late’. Alongside landscapes shot near the Nile and its delta, an Arab intellectual relates the history of the peasant resistance during the occupation by the British, who similarly employed bad timing. Much has been written about the film’s ebb and flow structure, especially by Serge Daney, who observed its musical and ‘meteorological’ play not seen since the silent era. ‘Trop tôt, trop tard is, to the best of my knowledge, one of the rare films, since Sjöström, to have filmed the wind’.”(Cinematheque Ontario)

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OPENING NIGHT OF THE FESTIVAL
KASK, Wed 30.03.2011

Amongst others, Robert Fenz’ Vertical Air will be shown on the opening.

Robert Fenz
Vertical Air
US, 1996, 16mm, b/w, sound, 26′

The result of an experiment with sound and image, composition and improvisation, in collaboration with Wadada Leo Smith, who will perform live at Vooruit on Friday. “The musical system in Vertical Air allows not only the predetermined to blossom but also the improvised to emerge. Improvisation and its cinematographic equivalent manifest themselves from the moment of shooting, and through the composition of the frame to the editing process itself. Verticality is drawn from the simultaneity of both arts, the creation of independent melodic lines that are echoed by the editing of images traversing in a bird’s eye view the vastness of the North American territory”. (Gabriela Trujillo)

ARTIST IN FOCUS: Sylvain George
In the context of the Courtisane Festival 2011 (Gent, March 30 – April 3 2011)

Sylvain George (1968, Vaulx-en-Velin, France) studied philosophy and worked as a social worker until he turned to filmmaking in 2004. His work, influenced greatly by the thinking of Walter Benjamin, combines militant commitment with formal experiment. “The idea”, he says, “is to make films that take a stand and assert a political position, and at the same time not to separate content from form; to be formally demanding and to manage to define an own view and grammar as a filmmaker.” Far away from any form of didacticism or dogmatism, his films – from short “contre feux” filmed with a mobile phone to elaborate feature-length documentaries – depict and allegorise the struggles of the “nouveaux damnés”, trapped between the rule and the exception: the stateless, the clandestine, the precarious. His most recent work, the impressive Qu’ils reposent en révolte (des figures de guerre), gives an account of the living conditions of migrants in Calais over a period of three years (2007-2010). “Politically speaking, it is about standing up, contesting these grey zones, these spaces or cracks like Calais standing somewhere between the exception and the rule, beyond the scope of law, where law is suspended, where individuals are deprived, stripped off their most fundamental rights. And that while creating, through some dialectic reversal, the ‘true’ exceptional states. Space-time continuums where beings and things are fully restored to what they were, are, will be, could be or could have been”. Rebellion and emancipation are at the heart of George’s films, which find true politics in the gestures, cries and bodies of those who are within the dominant socio-economical order considered as “surplus”: Included, but not belonging.

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SCREENING-PERFORMANCE
Sylvain George / William Parker
Kunstencentrum Vooruit, Thu 31.03.2011, 20:30

At the occasion of the Courtisane Festival, Sylvain George’s film Qu’ils reposent en révolte (des figures de guerre) will be presented for the first time with a live accompaniment by jazz legend William Parker (1952, New York). Widely acknowledged as one of the most important musicians to emerge from the experimental jazz scene in New York, Parker’s impressive career spans several decades. A master of bass improvisation, he has collaborated with musicians such as Alan Silva, Rashid Ali, Cecil Taylor, Peter Brotzmann, Derek Bailey and Hamid Drake, played in many configurations, led a number of ensembles and composed music for opera, dance and film. Cinema is one of the pillars of his musical vision – he counts among his sources of inspiration avant-garde filmmakers such as Bruce Baillie, Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas. He writes in one of his texts : “it is the role of the artist to incite political, social and spiritual revolution. To awaken us from our sleep and never let us forget our obligations as human beings, to light the fire of human compassion”. During this performance Parker will play the bass solo, rooting the musical spaces between bow, fingers and strings, in a dialogue between hearing and seeing, in search for a pure experience of beauty and energy. Or as a spectator to one of his concerts once described “as if his bass were raw wood he was using to light an internal fire”.

Qu’ils reposent en révolte (des figures de guerre)
FR, 2010, b/w, various languages spoken, English subs, 150’

“Composed of fragments that refer back and become mixed up with each other, thus creating multiple games of temporality and spatiality, this film shows the living conditions of migrant persons in Calais over a period of three years (July 2007 to November 2010). In so doing, it shows how the policies engaged by modern police States extend beyond the law, and cause grey areas, cracks, zones of indistinction between the rule and the exception. Individuals (and primarily as enunciation of the ‘defeated,’ pariahs or contemporary plebs: refugees, displaced persons, undocumented immigrants, but also unemployed workers, young people of the poor suburbs…) see themselves thus treated like criminals; they are stripped, divested of the most elementary rights that make of them subjects of law and are reduced to the state of ‘pure bodies,’ or ‘bare lives.’ “ (SG)

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SCREENINGS
FILM-PLATEAU, Sat 02.04.2010

N’entre pas sans violence
FR, 2007, video, b/w, French spoken, English subs, 20’

“Rage in the heart. Head-on. The mouth agape. Raids. October 2005. A neighbourhood in Paris revolts, spontaneously. Only the injustice which befalls its inhabitants day after day is equal to the echo of their despair and anger. Historical gestus which recalls the most beautiful, fragile and resistant popular fights: Spartacus’s slaves, the insurgents of the Paris commune, blacks, Latinos… Worlds that are like tighten fists, beating hearts, just as the chests rise up.” (SG)

No Border
FR, 2007, Super 8 to video, b/w, French spoken, English subs, 23’

“Paris, open city. Dizziness of commemorations. Ruins. Winds. Tides. Naked eyes. The young migrants – Iraqis, Afghans, Iranians – wander in the streets, between soup kitchens and fortune camps. As they leave, they provoke a crisis of the order of things and bourgeois society. A movement of emancipation arises, profoundly melancholic, elegiac : to redefine the concept of revolution through a new concept of History”. (SG)

Ils nous tueront tous…
FR, 2009, video, b/w, sound, French spoken, English subs, 11’

Part of Outrage & Rébellion, a collective film made for Joachim Gatti, a filmmaker who was badly hurt by the policie during a peaceful demonstration in Montreuil in July 2009. “Description in the dark of the night of a raid against migrants near the Calais harbour. Description, in the dark, of a political night. To choose one’s side” (SG)

14:45 : “LES JOURS DE COLERE”
compiled and presented by Sylvain George

“Every epoch dreams the next one”
— Walter Benjamin

“This world is half the devil’s and my own”
— Dylan Thomas

René Vautier
Afrique 50
FR, 1950, 16mm, b/w, French spoken, English subtitles,17′

“The Empire is waiting. Get involved in the colony.
Mali, the High Volta, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Burkina Faso… hunting playgrounds for the West, experimental fields for colonial, racial and economical wars. From yesterday to today, and until the revolts – isolated voices, stolen films, collective choirs – burn the arrogance of the powerful, with a roar resonating in History.” (SG)

Manoel de Oliveira
A caça
PT, 1964, 16mm, color, sound, Portugese spoken, French subtitles, 21’

“Have the wolves ever howled ?
On hunting, without fire weapons nor victims, and quicksand as conditions of common living.
Fear, destruction, the “everyone against everyone war”, mythical and dreadful nature, act here as conceptual lures, presenting the world as it doesn’t work: it’s always constructed. Men have to face themselves.
Of a film facing dictatorship.
Of revolution as gesture.”
(SG)

Angela Ricci-Lucchi & Yervant Gianikian
Prigionieri della guerra
IT, 2004, colour & b/w, sound, 71’

“To resist. On the frontlines.
Soldier-men tracked down, hunted, prisoners, exhibited as trophy, deportations and working camps in Siberia and Austria, cities in ruins, scars, mass graves… Prigionieri della guerra is the first chapter of the “trilogy of war” devoted to the first world war as a “forgotten war”. Or how to wake up from the dream of an “European era” : industralised mass massacres, fascism, control societies, violence inflicted to nature, failure of classical humanism.
On the burning becoming of memory.”
(SG)

16:45 L’IMPOSSIBLE

L’Impossible – Pages arrachées
2009, Super 8, DV, 16mm to video, b/w & colour, French spoken, English subs, 135’

A film in five chapters, with titles inspired by figures such as Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Dostoïevski and Benjamin, that oscillates between Calais and Paris, black&white and colour, sound and silence. “To pan wide, to gather food for eye and mind, such is the project. Because Sylvain George, as we have come to understand, perceives his film-making activity as a mission with at least a dual purpose. To claim, on the one hand the avant-gardes’ formal inheritance, drawing on the unbridled vigour of their “logical revolts”. On the other hand, get these manifestations to testify for those who cry out for justice and justly call for shots other than those laid down by prevailing standards. Evocative, though with precise dates and references, silent while at the same time in quest of the most just eloquence, this cinema seeks to bring together both the past and what is as yet unnamed.“ (Jean-Pierre Rehm)

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OPENING NIGHT OF THE FESTIVAL
KASK, Wed 30.03.2011

Amongst others, Sylvain George’s contre feux n° 3 & 4 will be shown, a selection of what he considers “petites formes”, excerpts from a series of intervention films.

Europe année 06 (Fragments Ceuta)
FR, 2006 – 2008, video, French spoken, English subs, 21’

“Rimbaud/Genet/Buñuel/Rossellini/Pasolini… A group of Algerian teenagers survive in an abandoned warehouse in Ceuta, waiting to reach Europe. A certain idea of youth is at stake. Of youth as migration, and of migrations as the spring that occurs every new year. The spring or the awakening of sexes as would say Pasolini, the art of encounter and a vagabond heart, forcing Europe and the established order to reflect on what they are: old (Postures of withdrawal. Self preservation. Fear). You will never be able to escape them anymore.” (SG)

Un homme idéal (Fragments K.)
FR, 2006 – 2008, video, French spoken, English subs, 12’

“A man walks in the city. Paris. Mister K. Just like the 30.000 families who have put their last hope in the circular of S., Mr K. waits and waits and waits… And while he waits, we discover a petrified face, that of French society in state of war…” (SG)