March 2011 – Diagonal Thoughts

ARTIST IN FOCUS: Robert Beavers

ARTIST IN FOCUS: Robert Beavers
03.04.2011 – 09.04.2011, Courtisane Festival 2011 (Gent) & Cinematek (Brussels)

Robert Beavers (1949, Brookline, Massachusetts) is one of the most influential avant-garde filmmakers of the second half of the 20th century. Although born and raised in the United States, he has been living and making films in Europe since 1967. His 16mm films, at the same time lyrical and rigorous, sensuous and complex, are inhabited by the landscapes, the architecture and the cultural traditions of the Mediterranean and Alpine cities and countryside where they are filmed, and yet reveal deeper personal and aesthetic themes. As he acknowledges himself, he strives “for the projected film image to have the same force of awakening sight as any other great image.” He regards filming as part of a complex procedure, which begins in the eyes of the filmmaker and is shaped by his gestures in relation to the camera. Beavers’s attention to the physicality of the film medium is evident also in the editing, a fully manual process that leads to a unique form of phrasing. Harry Tomicek calls it a form of “cinematic breathing”: “an exchange of speech and silence, emergence and concealment. Robert Beavers might be the only filmmaker in the world whose works announce the mystery of this process.”
Until the late 1990s his films were very rarely shown, but recent retrospectives at the Tate Modern London, the Whitney Museum in New York, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley and the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna have finally brought to his work the attention it deserves. Courtisane and Cinematek will join forces to present his oeuvre in Ghent and Brussels, a city Beavers has a strong attachment to but where his work hasn’t been screened in several decades. Brussels was not only the first European city where he settled together with his partner filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos (1928-1992) after leaving the United States but also where his film culture and cinephilia developed, thanks to Jacques Ledoux, the then curator of the Royal Belgian Film Archive. Ledoux also encouraged Beavers to continue making films, and is one of the protagonists of Plan of Brussels (1968). From his Early Monthly Segments to his most recent work The Suppliant (2010), this selective retrospective in Brussels and Ghent covers more than 40 years of work and represents for Beavers an occasion to return to the scene of his beginnings as a filmmaker, the Brussels Cinémathèque.

On the last day of the Courtisane festival, April 3, Robert Beavers will present a selection of films of his own as well as by other filmmakers in Ghent. The following week, four more screening programmes will follow in Cinematek, the film theatre of the Belgian Royal Film Archive.
With the support of SWISS FILMS

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PROGRAMME 1
Film-Plateau, Gent (Courtisane Festival)
Sun 03.04.2010, 15:00

Ruskin
1975/1997, 35mm, b/w & colour, sound, 45’
Filmed in Italy (Venice), Switzerland (the Grisons) and England (London).

“Ruskin visits the sites of (art critic) John Ruskin’s work: London, the Alps and, above all, Venice, where the camera’s attention to masonry and the interaction of architecture
and water mimics the author’s descriptive analysis of the ‘stones’ of the city. The sound of pages turning and the image of a book, Ruskin’s Unto This Last, forcibly reminds us that a poet’s perceptions and in this case his political economy, are preserved and reawakened through acts of reading and writing”. (P. Adams Sitney)

The Suppliant
2010, 16mm, colour, sound, 5’
Filmed in USA (New York)

”My filming for The Suppliant was done in February 2003, while a guest in the Brooklyn Heights apartment of Jacques Dehornois. When I recollect the impulse for this filming, I remember my desire to show a spiritual quality united to the sensual in my view of this small Greek statue. I chose to reveal the figure solely through its blue early morning highlights and in the orange sunlight of late afternoon. After filming the statue, I walked down to the East River and continued to film near the Manhattan Bridge and the electrical works; then I returned to the apartment and filmed a few other details. I set this film material aside, while continuing to film and edit Pitcher of Colored Light, later I took it up twice to edit but could not find my way. Most of the editing was
finally done in 2009 then I waited to see whether it was finished and found that it was not. In May 2010, I made several editing changes and created the sound track with thoughts of this friend’s recent death.” (RB)

Pitcher of Colored Light
2007, 16mm, colour, sound, 23’
Filmed in USA (Falmouth, Massachusetts)

“…The shadows play an essential part in the mixture of loneliness and peace that exists here. The seasons move from the garden into the house, projecting rich diagonals in the early morning or late afternoon. Each shadow is a subtle balance of stillness and movement; it shows the vital instability of space. Its special quality opens a passage to the subjective; a voice within the film speaks to memory. The walls are screens through which I pass to the inhabited privacy. We experience a place through the perspective of where we come from and hear another’s voice through our own acoustic. The sense of place is never separate from the moment.” (RB)

CARTE BLANCHE TO ROBERT BEAVERS

Marie Menken
Bagatelle for Willard Maas
US, 1958/1961, 16mm, colour, silent, 5’30”

Ute Aurand
India
DE, 2005, 16mm, colour, sound, 57’

“The first time that I viewed a film program by Marie Menken, I dismissed it; the same happened with my first viewing of a film by Ute Aurand. These filmmakers were opposite poles to my own way of filmmaking, and, in selecting this carte-blanche program, I reflect how my experience of their films has changed. Fortunately I had other occasions to see their films. The initial irritation and uncertainty suddenly opened to recognition. To experience discontent can be a sign of growth, a turning point in (my) appreciation of a film, a piece of music or a poem. Filmmakers, like Menken or Aurand, hide themselves in their directness and simplicity. Their use of handheld camera and their awareness of rhythm create a vision that draws its strength from their surroundings, but the vitality of this open embrace contains a genuine shyness or reticence. It was not until I recognized this that I could see how their lyric contains a depth.
Marie Menken’s Bagatelle for Willard Maas is a clear example. It possesses the qualities of angularity, rhythmic emphasis, sensitivity to surfaces and other means to express sensuousness, and through her spontaneity, she carries her film from one mood to the next until we reach the conclusion. And she is a collaborator; she allows Teiji Ito’s music an equal place. The film appears to meander, the way that a visitor to Versailles might, but I believe that in the change in moods there are elements of a story, one is the encounter of a gentle sphinx with a wounded slave and the other is the revolution.
Using a different metaphor to introduce Ute Aurand’s India, I could say that it is a ‘symphony’, and that her three visits to Pune are its three movements. The basic rhythm is established through her filming short clusters of images, often with camera movements that are like “little side steps,” and sometimes these clusters develop into complex rhythmic variations on the sights that she discovers as she walks, rides or drives through the city. This kaleidoscope of impressions, both of sound and image, is punctuated by pauses in which the filmmaker inserts her own presence through details of a shirt, a coffee cup, a notebook, an earring or other self-reflections in her room.
Some images have an animistic power; I remember a cluster of three small leaves at the base of a giant tree. They shiver in the wind to the sound of drums and that precedes a truly ecstatic dance-procession, one of an entire series of dances in the film.
Aurand also has the courage to approach children’s faces. She has said, “Even though I am living through what I see, what I want to reach is the invisible. The screen is a doorway; it is like my relation to the children, also a vehicle to the beyond.”
Returning once more to her camera’s “side steps”, I have only recently noticed how these movements allow her a beautiful ease and swiftness in transitions. These transitions from one subject to the next are also like music, but a music that incorporates qualities that are less dualistic than our own.
We see in these films two filmmakers using the very common opportunity of filming their travel; one is a ‘tourist’ visiting Versailles, the other is in India. But for the spectator who will look carefully, there is a generosity and probity that reaches through the surface pleasure to the embrace of life and mortality.” (RB)

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PROGRAMME 2
Cinematek, Brussels
Tue 05.04.2011 19:00 (in the presence of Robert Beavers)

Early Monthly Segments
1968-70/2002, 35mm, colour, silent, 33’
Cast: Robert Beavers, Gregory Markopoulos, Tom Chomont.
Filmed in Switzerland, Germany (Berlin), and Greece.

“Early Monthly Segments, filmed when Beavers was 18 and 19 years old, now forms the opening to his film cycle, “My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure.” It is a highly stylized work of self-portraiture, depicting filmmaker and companion Gregory J. Markopoulos in their Swiss apartment. The film functions as a diary, capturing aspects of home life with precise attention to detail, documenting the familiar with great love and transforming objects and ordinary personal effects into a highly charged work of homoeroticism”. (Susan Oxtoby)

Work done
1972/1999, 35mm, colour, sound, 22’
Filmed in Italy (Florence) and Switzerland (the Grisons).

”Bracing in its simplicity, Work done was shot in Florence and the Alps, and celebrates an archaic Europe. Contemplating a stone vault cooled by blocks of ice or hand stitching of a massive tome or the frying of a local delicacy, Beavers considers human activities without dwelling on human protagonists. Like many of Beavers’ films, Work done is based on a series of textural transformative equivalences: the workshop and the field, the book and the forest, the mound of cobblestones and a distant mountain”. (J. Hoberman)

AMOR
1980, 35mm, colour, sound, 15’
Cast: Robert Beavers.
Filmed in Italy (Rome, Verona) and Austria (Salzburg).

“AMOR is an exquisite lyric, shot in Rome and at the natural theatre of Salzburg. The recurring sounds of cutting cloth, hands clapping, hammering, and tapping underline the associations of the montage of short camera movements, which bring together the making of a suit, the restoration of a building, and details of a figure, presumably Beavers himself, standing in the natural theatre in a new suit, making a series of hand movements and gestures. A handsomely designed Italian banknote suggests the aesthetic economy of the film: the tailoring, trimming, and chiseling point to the editing of the film itself.” (P. Adams Sitney).

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PROGRAMME 3
Cinematek, Brussels
Thu 07.04.2011 18:00

Winged Dialogue
1967/2000, 16mm, colour, sound, 3’
Cast: Gregory Markopoulos, Robert Beavers.
Filmed in Greece (Island of Hydra)

Plan of Brussels
1968/2000, 16mm, colour, sound, 18’
Cast: Robert Beavers, Giséle Frumkin, René Micha, Jacques Ledoux, Pierre Apraxine, Dimitri Balachoff and others.
Text: “Duvelor” by Michel de Ghelderode.
Filmed in Belgium (Brussels).
Note: The final edit combines both films on a single reel.

“Winged Dialogue details with growing clarity the desperate beauty and sexuality of the body animated by it’s soul, essence blindly reaching out, touching, in brilliant patterns through and beyond those of the vanishing images, expressed vividly in the after-image on the mind, on the soul’s eye”. (Tom Chomont).
“Shedding all traces of narrative in Plan of Brussels, Beavers filmed himself in a hotel room, both at his work desk and lying naked on the bed, while in rapid rhythmic cutting, and sometime in superimposition, the phantasmagoria of people he met in Brussels and images from the streets flood his mind”. (P. Adams Sitney).

From the Notebook of …
1971/1998, 35mm, colour, sound, 48’
Cast: Robert Beavers, Gregory Markopoulos and others.
Filmed in Italy (Florence).

“From the Notebook of … was shot in Florence and takes as its point of departure Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks and Paul Valéry’s essay on da Vinci’s process. These two elements suggest an implicit comparison between the treatment of space in Renaissance art and the moving image. The film marks a critical development in the artist’s work in that he repeatedly employs a series of rapid pans and upward tilts along the city’s buildings or facades, often integrating glimpses of his own face. As Beavers notes in his writing on the film, the camera movements are tied to the filmmakers’ presence and suggests his investigative gaze”. (Henriette Huldisch)

The Painting
1972/1999, 16mm, colour, sound, 13’
Cast: Robert Beavers, Gregory Markopoulos.
Filmed in Switzerland (Berne) and USA (Boston).

“The Painting intercuts shots of traffic navigating the old-world remnants of downtown Bern, Switzerland, with details from a 15th-century altarpiece, “The Martyrdom of St. Hippolytus”. The painting shows the calm, near-naked saint in a peaceful landscape, a frozen moment before four horses tear his body to pieces while an audience of soigné nobles look on; in the movie’s revised version, Beavers gives it a comparably rarefied psychodramatic jolt, juxtaposing shots of Gregory Markopoulos, bisected by shafts of light, with a torn photo of himself and the recurring image of a shattered windowpane”. (J. Hoberman)

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Programma 4
Cinematek, Brussels
Fri 08.04.2011 20:00

Wingseed
1985, 35mm, colour, sound, 15’
Cast: Arno Gutleb. Filmed in Greece (Anavvysos, Lyssaraia).

“A seed that floats in the air, a whirligig, a love charm. This magnificent landscape, both hot and dry, is far from sterile; rather, the heat and dryness produce a distinct type of life, seen in the perfect forms of the wild grass and seed pods, the herds of goats as well as in the naked figure. The torso, in itself, and more, the image which it creates in this light. The sounds of the shepherd’s signals and the flute’s phrase are heard. And the goats’ bells. Imagine the bell’s clapper moving from side to side with the goat’s movements like the quick side-to-side camera movements, which increase in pace and reach a vibrant ostinato”. (RB).

Sotiros
1976-78/1996, 35mm, colour, sound, 25’
Cast: Robert Beavers, Gregory Markopoulos.
Filmed in Greece (Athens, Sparta, Leonidion), Austria (Graz, Rein) and Switzerland (Berne).
Note: Three films are now combined within a single work.

“In Sotiros, there is an unspoken dialogue and a seen dialogue, The first is held between the intertitles and the images; the second is moved by the tripod and by the emotions of the filmmaker. Both dialogues are interwoven with the sunlight;s movement as it circles the room, touching each wall and corner, detached and intimate”. (RB).

Efpsychi
1983/1996, 35mm, colour, sound, 20’
Cast: Vassili Tsindoukidis.
Filmed in Greece (Athens).

“The details of the young actor’s face – his eyes, eyebrows, earlobe, chin, etc. – are set opposite the old buildings in the market quarter of Athens, where every street is named after a classic ancient Greek playwright. In this setting of intense stillness, sometimes interrupted by sudden sounds and movements in the streets, he speaks a single word, “teleftea”, meaning the last (one), and as he repeats this word, it moves differently each time across his face and gains another sense from one scene to the next, suggesting the uncanny proximity of eroticism, the sacred and chance”. (RB).

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Programma 5
Cinematek, Brussels
Sat 09.04.2011 18:00

The Hedge Theatre
1986-90/2002, 35mm, colour, sound, 19’
Cast: Robert Beavers, Gregory Markopoulos.
Filmed in Italy (Rome, Brescia).

“Some years after filming AMOR, I returned to Italy and found the source for a new film in the architecture of Borromini and in a grove of trees with empty birdcages. (A grove of trees, a rocolo, in which hunters would set out cages with decoys, called richiami, whose song attracted other birds.) The buoyant spaces of these cupolas, the sewing of a buttonhole, and the invisible bird hunt are all elements in the sustained dialogue of The Hedge Theatre”. (RB).

The Stoas
1991-97, 35mm, colour, sound, 22’
Cast: Robert Beavers.
Filmed in Greece (Athens, Gortynia).

“The title refers to the colonnades that led to the shady groves of the ancient Lyceum, here remembered in shots of industrial arcades, bathed in golden morning light, as quietly empty of human figures as Atget’s survey photos. The rest of the film presents luscious shots of a wooded stream and hazy glen, portrayed with the careful composition on 19th century landscape painting. An ineffable, unnameable immanence flows through the images of The Stoas, a kind of presence of the human soul expressed through the sympathetic absence of the human figure”. (Ed Halter).

The Ground
1993-2001, 35mm, colour, sound, 20’
Cast: Robert Beavers. Filmed in Greece (Island of Hydra).

“What lives in the space between the stones, in the space cupped between my hand and my chest? Filmmaker/stonemason. A tower or ruin of rememberance. With each swing of the hammer I cut into the image and the sound rises from the chisel. A rhythm, marked by repetition and animated by variation; strokes of hammer and fist, resounding in dialogue. In this space which the film creates, emptiness gains a conour strong enough for the spectator to see more than the image – a space permitting vision in addition to sight”. (RB).

Figures of Dissent

Notes on cinema and politics

It’s not enough to make political films, films must also be made politically. This dictum by Jean-Luc Godard reflects the longstanding tension between politics and cinema. It’s part of the introduction to his “What is to be done?” manifest from 1970, a sharp-toned piece which references Bertolt Brecht, Dziga Vertov and Vladimir Lenin, summarising the fundamental differences between the two above-mentioned notions in forty points. “For the first”, writes Godard, “it is enough to only open the eyes and the ears. The second means to be militant”. The combative tone illustrates the attitude of the French cinephile milieu at the time, which after the revolutions of May 1968 and the following disenchantments would see the need of taking an outspoken political role, parallel to a growing realisation that cinema – their idea of cinema –had become a shadow of what it once had been, or could have been. This was the time during which Godard and the editorial staff at Cahiers du Cinéma sought solace in Maoism; a short-lived impulse that would later be dismissed as “naive”, but which is indicative of the perceived failure of the great utopias that had characterised French left-wing thinking since the Liberation. The Prague Spring, Salvador Allende’s “Chilean experiment” and the Soviet version of communism had all failed and the idea of revolution seemed to be reduced to a selling slogan in the capitalist mindset. What was left was a great open void that seemed to be filled with nothing but bursts of violence, trivialisation and narcissism. The existing theoretical paradigms did not stand a chance: the interventions in the dialectic between ideology and representation, that had dominated the pages of Cahiers du Cinéma for years, came to nothing. The tragic events of the time demanded other forms of action and reflection, which more than ever needed to be directed to exploring and cultivating the political potential of cinema. In his first article as editor in chief of Cahiers in 1973 Serge Daney wrote: “For film-makers of all leanings, in this near-open battle, in their very craft of film-making, a single problem emerges: How can political statements be presented cinematically? How can they be made positive?”.

The critical attention of Daney and many others close to Cahiers, did not go out to the verification of the effectiveness of a given “militant” cinema (“all films are militant films”) but to the exploration of the relation between filmmaker and filmed subject. The favoured term was “point de vue” (point of view), which was interpreted in at least two different ways: on the one hand, as the application of a political discourse – which thus already exists before the film is made; on the other hand, as the position taken by the filmmaker, his crew and equipment during the shooting. In the context of a demonstration, a politically committed filmmaker will for instance always film from within the crowd, with the camera among the limbs, the flags and the cries of the demonstrators, contrary to the police or television, who tend to film the crowd from above (as if in order to count or – imaginary – machine-gun). The temptation was always high to dismiss that fundamental distinction as “political”, an argument that doesn’t hold up. What is here at stake is a question of morality: is the filmmaker aware of the camera’s power of intervention, interference and provocation? Can he be truthful to his ideas and yet be respectful to the images that he has made? This accent on the idea of the “point de vue” aligns with the long-time cinephile tradition of Cahiers du Cinéma, based on the idea that each cinematographic work represents a voice and a standpoint, a vision of the world that at the same time legitimises and organises the work. It is not enough to simply emphasize what is being told in a film, it is at least as important to lay bare where, when and by whom it is told. There can be no “énoncé” (statement) without “énonciation” (enunciation). In other words, the unquestioning belief in the intrinsic power of an idea is under no circumstances enough to settle a (political or ideological) argument. In Daney’s words: “We have to know that today the struggle must encompass point of view as well as choice of subject. As our Italian comrades of La Commune remind us: ‘It is not enough to counter the false statements of the bourgeoisie. In and through our own statements we must convey a different view of the world.”

In the light of this understanding of the notions of politics and cinema, the traditional distinctions between documentary and fiction can no longer be sustained – the “framing” of reality always implies a form of fiction – but neither can the distinction between “mise en scène” (as in: staged, constructed) and the so called “direct” filmmaking (as in: from “real” life). For Daney, “bourgeoisie does not only hold the monopole of the images of reality, it also has the monopole of the mise en scène of that reality. A city, a film theatre, a public space… are already ‘mises en scène’. There is already a given use of time and space that is laid out by obligatory paths to be followed, thresholds, out of bounds”. There is no “real” world, only a configuration of what is established as real, a system of coordinates that philosopher Jacques Rancière refers to as a “police order”: an order of bodies that defines what we do and what we don’t, and assigns those bodies to a particular place and function. It is an order of the visible and the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not, that one speech is understood as discourse and another as noise. It’s this “mise en scène”, more powerful because we are barely aware of it, that inevitably predetermines and conditions how and what to behold and film. The opposite of a mise en scène is thus not a pure, non-manipulated, direct take, but another mise en scène. The opposite of a direct take is not a mise en scène, but another take. “Another” in the sense that it makes a new perception possible. “Another” in the sense that the filmmaker takes a new position – spatially, morally, politically – in regards to what he films. It’s here that the potential of true politics resides: in breaking with the self-evidence of the “natural” order – that pushes people and things to certain positions, pins them down on a determinate time and space, assigns them to specific ways of being, seeing and saying – by reframing the given mise en scène, in search for alternative partitions of time and space, new configurations of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise. Rancière has a word for this: dissensus.

The greatest danger of our time, according to Rancière, is consensus. The term does not simply mean the agreement of political parties or social partners about the common interests of a community, it implies the resolute abolition of every form of political subjectivity, of every possibility of breaking through the dominant categories of classification and identification. By objectivising the conditions of any possible collective situation, every dispute is fundamentally neutralised: what is left are endless arguments over the administration and configuration of who and what has already been given a place and function. In other words, consensus is what reduces politics to police. Consensus, as a form of government, reduces the role of the state to that of regulating and controlling identities, space and movements, a stalemate which is greatly determined by the global economical order. As states have less control over the circulation of capital, they fall back on what is still within their power: the circulation of persons. This control, in permanent conflict with all the identities that it has not created itself, is today not only one of the principal tasks of the state; it is becoming its essential raison d’être. The recent hardening of immigration policies in many European countries and its resulting forms of stigmatisation and discrimination illustrate what has grown to become the ultimate trading mark of the consensual state: the management of (in)security. Only in the moments when the ranks are broken, when those who don’t have the right to speak raise their voices (“Nous ne sommes pas en trop, nous sommes en plus” – “We are not surplus, but a plus”), when those who don’t count make their existence known (“On est ici, on est d’ici” – “We are here, we are from here”), on those moments when the dreadful contradictions and logics of the dominant order are brought to light, only then politics becomes possible. In that sense politics always implies resistance. A resistance that is born in the refusal to accept the place that has been assigned to people and things. Politics assumes dissensus: two worlds in one.

Politics situates itself not in the administration and the demonstration of the apparatus of power but in the gestures, glimpses and cries of those who are not recognised by the same apparatus. It’s in this intersection of politics and aesthetics that the work of French filmmaker Sylvain George is to be found: in the struggle of the “nouveaux damnés” (“the new damned”), trapped between the rule and the exception: the outcasts, the unemployed, the “sans papiers”, the young with no voice and even less perspectives; they who are regarded within the dominant socio-political order as “surplus”: included but not belonging. But George is not the sort of filmmaker to embellish his sympathy with an overflow of commentary and explanation, nor to fall into a pedagogical ceremony of misery and sorrow. Instead of organizing his formal strategies around the worn out strategies of causality and narrative, structure and texture are put in the service of allegorical examinations where people and things have their full potential restored. Rancière writes that cinema “must agree to be the surface upon which the experience of people relegated to the margins of economic circulations and social trajectories try to be ciphered in new figures”. It is not the task of art and cinema to endorse the self-evidence of the “real”, but to seize the relation between reality and signification, between appearing and being. In the words of filmmaker Philippe Garrel, there is certainly “a solidarity between real artists and revolutionaries, because they both refuse ordinary identifications.” In the films of George representation tears itself off from itself, in search for new figurations, new trajectories between what we see and what we know. Fable-like figures, worn faces, burned hands: the body constantly takes up the space of the image, but always resisting recognition, always on the verge of disappearance. It is the perceptible tension between the visible and the invisible, presence and absence, individual and collective, that leads us to a confrontational awareness: here is life.

“Ce qui n’a jamais été vu, n’est pas reconnu” (“What hasn’t been seen, cannot be recognised”) wrote once Daney. The consequence is clear: “on a un manque d’image” (“we have a shortage of images”). The problem is not, as it’s generally considered, that there are too many images; on the contrary: there can never be enough. The problem is that there are too few images that contest the dominant mise en scène, too few that give visibility to what is ignored by the dominant order; too many of the same, too little of the “other”. It’s not that there are no images of grief, violence, injustice and revolt; on the contrary, we get to see them regularly in the countless news reports and current affairs television shows self-evidently presenting us the state of the world. But they are always overshadowed by the faces and the voices of those who fabricate the news, those who speak with authority, the newsmakers, politicians and specialists. These are their images: their effigies that validate their words, their selection of visibilities that their words designate as relevant and in turn validate the same words. It isn’t that we don’t get to see any suffering or struggling people. But what we see are far too often bodies without a name, too many faces that do not return the gaze that we direct at them, too many voices that are spoken about, but who don’t get the chance to speak themselves. What Sylvain George’s images do is let these bodies speak for themselves: words of fire and dream, gestures of rage and despair. The spontaneous outbursts of resistance in a Paris neighbourhood in N’entre pas sans violence (2007), the voicing of hope and desperation in the harbour city of Calais in Qu’ils reposent en révolte (des figures de guerre) (2010): these are the stories of a few, who stand for the stories of many. For if there is something that we should retain, this is it: everyone has a story.

“Aesthetisising” is a grievance often heard referring to the portrayal of misery. Making “beautiful” images in the light of the intolerable can only indicate indifference, or even worse, a gesture of “populism”. This line of thinking is the consequence of using simplistic oppositions between wealth and misery, between passivity and involvement, between what is given and what is seized. The question of aesthetics is not a matter of choosing a certain formula in order to grasp the hard “reality”. It’s a question of searching for a relation to the configuration of space and the rhythm of time, a question of experiencing and grasping the energy that space and time hold, a question of “point de vue”. This is the attitude that is imbedded in Sylvain George’s images. There is no trivial formalism hidden in the way he pays attention to the wealth of the landscapes surrounding the refugees in Qu’ils reposent en révolte; there is no cheap populism hidden in the patience with which he listens to their stories. Everything that is seized, is given back: the misery of the world, the power of speech, the possibility of resistance. This is a poetry of exchange that is also present in the films of American filmmaker Robert Fenz. His work displays a conviction that the real is not a “given”, the real can only be “framed”. That’s why the inclination to naturalism is foreign to him, as it would only be a confirmation of the dominating mise en scène. The challenge is to break though this order, to disclose it, to fracture it. “Realism must always be won”, according to Daney. Hence Robert Fenz’s preferred use of grainy black&white 16mm film, against the naturalistic impulses of the audiovisual industry. Hence his restless passion for the frame – the passion of a cameraman who understands that filming amounts to choosing. The frame, in André Bazin’s words, is a “mask”, hiding all what happens outside of it. But in Fenz’s films, the frame is much more than a delimitation of the visible: it’s an invitation to the invisible.

Meditations on Revolution (1997- 2003) is the title of a series of films that represent the heart of Fenz’s oeuvre. “Revolution” does not refer here to the overthrow of a form of state, but to the countless nameless revolutions inscribed in rural and urban spaces, steeped in hollowed and smiling faces, dancing on the rhythms of a world in constant transition. “Revolution” takes here the form of a sensible world. A dance lesson in the bustling streets of Havana, children playing in a shanty town in Rio de Janeiro, the hard-trained torso of a boxer in Greenville, Mississippi, the proud but fatigued monologue of a jazz musician (the late Marion Brown) in New York: the politics of Fenz’s films does not lie in lecturing on economical or geo-political issues, but in the reframing of bodies, the world they live in and the place that they take in that world. Politics resides in the confrontation of power and impotence, reality and possibility, inside and outside, “here” and “there”. It lies in the way films are made. “Say how things are real”, as Godard proclaims, is what making political films implies. Making films politically: “to say how things really are”.

Sylvain George and Robert Fenz are two of the “Artists in Focus” on the Courtisane Festival 2011.

Translated from Dutch by María Palacios Cruz
Images are taken from various films by Robert Fenz and Sylvain George