The cruel radiance of what is

vdk.jpg

By Serge Daney

Originally published as ‘La radiation cruelle de ce qui est’‘, Cahiers du Cinéma no. 290-291 (July/August 1978).

There are, properly speaking, no scenes in the films of JVdK, but fragments. Not parts of all that is to come and certainly not the pieces of a puzzle to reconstruct. But fragments of cinema, that is to say: carrying in them, with them, on them (that’s the whole issue) traces of a mining of the real, an imaginary operation of which they are the enigmatic rests. There is something chirurgical in these fragments, that doesn’t only derive, in the case of Van der Keuken, from his past as a photographer but also from his position, or rather his posture, as cameraman, man-with-camera or man-as-camera: the eye riveted on the peephole of a camera that is too heavy, the eye that sees and chooses at the same time, that is to say: cuts, slices, clean as a laser. There is an extreme, tyrannical attention for all that frames, and the lived sentiment, undoubtedly nauseating, of an excessive frame, everywhere, always, which implies that there is nothing left to overframe, reframe, deframe. And that which constitutes the frame, of course, is first of all that: the frame that isolates it from the rest, that directs the rest to the limbs of the out-of-frame. Furthermore, it’s the fragment that fixes our look, appropriates it and, in turn, looks at us. Cut off from everything, the fragment of cinema gives us the eye.

When we say that the fragment makes us loose the whole – the whole constituted by “all that remains” – it concerns equally the rest of the world, the rest of the images of the world, the indefinite rest of all that could have been in the same place. The fragment is also that what the professional documentarist has to avoid at all costs – he who has as a mission to make us forget the arbitrariness in the choice of images. The paradox of JVdK who, if he ever becomes well known, will be certainly classified as “documentarist”, is that he makes films against himself, like swimming against the tide, against that part of himself that is content with the easy beauty of images. VdK has made his cinema into a strange machine to de-confound, un-startle, a war machine against the enigma of halted movement, against photography. Not by “denouncing” the illusive seduction of images, but rather by way of excess (at which point the plastic sumptuousness of his most recent film, De Platte Jungle, has something discouraging or even excessive). And the only way he has been able to set up this machine is by making us witness and accomplice of this imaginary operation (the mining, the grafting) that breaks the image into fragments.

The fragment is affected by two possible futures: fetishistic and dialectical. Either it’s self-sufficient, makes us forget about the rest, confounds and startles. Or it stands as a moment in a process, a link in a chain, articulation to what is not itself but that which works with it (what for? For sense, always to come, having the last word, never outspoken). But the opposition only appears to be settled. Or rather: it only meets, with a maximum of acuteness, in the work of filmmakers who are the mystics of real inscription, who besides JMS and JLG we should also include JVdk. It’s in their work that the oscillation between the two futures of the fragment is experienced with the greatest violence – and seriousness. At times the petrification of time in an image, fetish that opens up to (perverse) pleasure, at times the stages, the phases, the inbetween, the dialectics that covers up the desire. It’s in their work (and in Eisenstein’s of course) that we see best at which point, in cinema, the willingness of dialectics has always something to do with the exorcism of the fetish.

Don’t we call dialectics this craft, for filmmakers, that consists of not ceasing to retrace their steps, towards their own productions, their images, to feign to find them changed, become “other” (changed by the look of the spectator – this rival), and giving themselves the right to go back, “covered up by dialectics”. Refusal to abandon them, refusal to manipulate them, shame to the spectator for seeing them wrong, duty to do something about it, it’s one single operation, but in multiple times, comparable to the act of the painter who “takes distance” from his canvas, to see it in another way (detached, as if it was made by somebody else), before the silent order to go back to it is suggested (and, between two strokes, the word of order is precisely: don’t touch!). That is how one can turn his productions into objects of his thinking, this is how the two futures of the fragment come together, in this detour which is going and returning at the same time*. I’m thinking of Godard having the “obligation” to go back to certain moments in his film (Victoire becoming Ici et Ailleurs), like going back to the scene of the crime, or Straub-Huillet filming a book that they’ve read and filming the author of that book reading today what he has written yesterday. Or Van der Keuken remaking Blind Kind.

There is an expression that summarizes well the cinema of VdK, form as well as content: unequal exchange. It indicates a political reality which is the last word of the relations between the rich and poor countries as well as the status of all cinematographic fragments. Every fragment is seized (at the same time victory, extortion and mining) from something, cruelly, arbitrary. The unequal exchange constitutes the fragment but in return the fragment makes us forget about the unequal exchange and tends to play fetish. The unequal exchange finds its way about in the situation of filming (extortion of over-imaging) as well as in the choice of places or framings. It’s through this omnipresent dimension of unequal exchange that the moralization of the relation between film and spectator is brought about (the possibility that a film is abject). One could go on to say that every fragment (all that results from a decision, a choice, a toss of the dice) is injust.

And this unequal exchange, if it can’t be abolished (it is inescapable), at least it has to be made present, it has to mark the images and make the spectator responsible. “Every scene”, writes Fargier (Cahiers 289), “even before being incorporated in a sequence, sees itself already being stratified during the shooting by the telling collision of the real and a look.” Since about fifteen years, the films of VdK (that’s where their political dimension lies) don’t stop proclaiming that every exchange is unequal.

Unequal exchange (1): filming/filmed. Only in the act of filming manifest itself the impossible reciprocity between the one who films and the one who is filmed, which VdK illustrates, in the most radical way, by making infirmity one of his favorite themes. Facing the blind (in Herman Slobbe, see also the text by Fargier), the deaf (in De Nieuwe Ijstijd the Dutch workers are deafened by the factory work), the ones who do not dispose of vital space (in Vier Muren, small film about the housing crisis, the impossibility of holding up – see Cahiers 289, “Espaces contraignants”), facing all these limitations of perception, there can be no “good place” for the filmmaker. The unequal exhange, if I dare say so, stares you in the face.

It’s here that VdK commits himself, risks something. He doesn’t turn himself away from these boundary situations (that he visibly holds dear), no more than he enwraps them in the abjection of a discourse of assistance due to the most “disadvantaged”. He pushes the search for the “wrong place” as far as he can. And if the good place, in cinema, is where we forget our bodies, the wrong place, the one of the moralist, is where the body reminds us of ourselves. In order to better bring forward the inescapable character of the unequal exchange, one has to draw out the two poles of exchange, that is to say: one has to bring forward the body of the filmmaker. I refer to the words of VdK, which show evidence of lucidity with regard to what he does: “The camera is heavy… It’s a weight that matters and entails that the movements of the machine can’t take place freely, every movement counts, weighs…”. We are spectators twice. We cannot have a just relation to those who are filmed (all infirmed in one way or another, because they are being filmed) than from the moment where we also have a relation with the pain, the work, the shame (physical and moral) of the filmmaker.

The moral of a filmmaker is always the search for a triangulation: filmer/filmed/spectator. It is always, in the way that it implies a posture of the filmmaker (or an exhibition, a pose), indissociable from a dimension of scandal. The identification of Van der Keuken with Herman Slobbe is scandalous (the exchange is too unequal) because it is scandalous that the difficulties of the filmmaker’s work echo the existential difficulties of a young blind man. In the same way that it is scandalous that Godard tries to make a young welder understand that the gestures of his craft are also the gestures of writing, writing being the craft of Godard (Six fois deux: nobody here). But these scandals are precious. Because it’s on this condition (bringing forward the filmmaker’s body) that Blind Kind sends back to oblivion all that it could have been (humanitary docucu to shameful voyeurism) and ends up giving us access to the character of Herman Slobbe, as he also exists outside of the film, with his own projects, his callousness, and most of all – that’s where the biggest scandal lies – his relation to pleasure. The film ends with a strange “each one for himself” that doesn’t make sense except for the fact that, for twenty minutes in the film, everyone has been (everything for) the other in regards to the spectator.

Inequal Exchange (2): here/elsewhere. Why would there be cinematographic fragments, if there are people for whom there is nothing to see or hear? This question, we just saw, allowed to highlight, almost ad absurdum, the unequal exchange between filming and being filmed, and all of the sudden, the arbitrariness of all fragments. There are other questions, also present in the films of VdK, that have more to do with his ideological and political choices and his rigorous anti-imperialism. Why film here, in this country, if the key of what we are filming is elsewhere, in another country, situated at the antipodes? In the three films that he has devoted to the relations between rich countries and poor countries (the North/South triptych), VdK doesn’t deal with the “good place” as much as he takes infirmity as subject. All the more so because he knows that the exhange between rich countries and poor countries is more and more unequal. It’s a similar reality – imperialism – that all at once yields one people dependant of another, chains them (pillaging, unequal share of the crumbs of pillage) and exotisizes them more and more (folklorisation). It’s also imperialism that allows the filmmaker to interweave diverse fragments: an icecream factory in Holland, a shanty town held by leftists in Peru, a supermarket in the States, fishermen in the Balearic Islands etc.

This game of here and elsewhere subsists even though the third-worldly sensibility (and rhetorics) of the seventies gives way to a certain disenchantment. At the moment of the war between Vietnam and Cambodja or the Marrocan intervention in Shaba, it’s first of all in Europa (Voorjaar), and then where he lives, in Holland (De Platte Jungle), that VdK pursues the dialectics of here and elsewhere. In this shrinkage of political horizon, this passage from macro to micro, it’s always the same search for chainings that moves the filmmaker, who nourishes his coming and going between fetish (the link making us forget about the chain) and dialectics (chain that doesn’t want to know about links).

What accomplishes itself is a ecological sensibility, already present in the triptych and what is without a doubt – for Van der Keuken as for all the moralists of real inscription – the only way to save politics. Which is to say: follow other chains than the chains of economic exploitation, follow the thread that binds the animalcules of the Waddenzee to the workers at sea and the ones in the nuclear power stations. There is, in this dialectics of nature, a politisation of the idea of environment which in return permits to get across the line between here and elsewhere, not only between the continents, but also between things that are infinitly closer, in the same place, at the most in the same scene.

Unequal exchange (3): this/that. It’s the third operation, which consists of marking the arbitrariness of the fragment in the act of filming (it is therefor essential that VdK is his own cameraman). It consists of displacing the attention towards the edges of the frame and towards the immediate out-of-frame. “When I shoot I sometimes try to look a bit towards the left or the right, and when there is something very insignificant or too significant introducing itself, then I go back.” In this strange practice of deframing, it is as if the fragment doubles itself before our very eyes, unhitching from itself, producing the time for hesitation, in a sort of oscillation, the cruel arbitrariness of the cut by the same glimpse that excludes (beyond the edge, the outer-edge). Practicising a right to look, certainly, but of a very particular kind. Because what is produced in this movement of going and returning, is not a dramatisation of the out-of-frame as a supposed reserve of what threatens or boggles the frame, but what Bonitzer calls (in his text about deframing, Cahiers 284) a “suspens non narratif”. Its function is rather to insinuate a doubt, a distrust in regards to the legitimacy of the frame (filming this… but this, next to it, might also be good…). The fragment dramatizes itself, detaches from itself, in order to signify what is a toss of the dice (arbitrary, happenstance) but also a stroke of force.

In the last analysis however, VdK’s struggle to dialectisize the fragment (we have successively seen an intersubjective dialectics, a dialectics of history, a dialectics of edge and outer-edge) stumbles over the irreducibility of the fragment. Of the fragment of cinema, this fetish. Writing about Nietzsche, about ”la parole de fragment”, Blanchot writes: “A speech that is unique, solitary, fragmented, but, by virtue of being a fragment, already complete in the breaking up from which it proceeds and of a sharpness of edge that refers back to no shattered thing.” It is not coincidental that Blanchot signals the sharpness of the fragment, adding at once that it doesn’t refer to any shattered thing. Nor any enlightened thing. Because the shatter leads us towards the light. Writing about the fetish, Rosolato (in Unknown Binding) signals: “the dullest, dirtiest objects always have this ability, proven in a way that is much more blatant than it imposes itself, a contrario, for a glowing that only exists because of the sole attraction that is conferred to them by way of their role as fetish.” And thereby, the light, the dissemination of luminous sources and points in VdK’s work originates in a sort of intimate illumination. The list of points, rounds, luminous circles would be long. Jewels or shiny filth. From the shimmer of a turning door (Vier Muren) to a piece of bloody meat. Eyes built into a wall or onlooking pebbles (Lucebert); Empty orbits of blind children (first version), redoubled from an opening of the diaphragm, to innumerable television stations, lit up or put out. This light, this materialization of a point of view is not the result of an illumination, but of a grafting. A grafting, an implant of light in the fragment. A quick scene in De Tijdsgeest shows a newspaper announcing the successful implant of a baboon’s cornea in South-Africa. The newspaper cutting has itself the shape of an eye. It’s this grafted light that outlines the empty place of the eye, sometimes literary, that also makes the fragment into a fetish, that is to say: an impossible object in which we can gaze at ourselves.

* It can only be a matter of coming-and-going. Absorbing ourselves in the fetish is, à la limite, impossible (it would be like flirting with one’s own images, like Wenders). Adjourning sense ad infinitum in the name of dialectics is, to say it in a vulgar way, “reculer pour mieux sauter”. In Straub/Huilet’s Fortini/Cani, for example, the retroactive game of signifying blocs, the interrelation of all the fragments, the difference of the last word doesn’t prevent the film from closing itself with one of the marxist fetish phrases (the one where it is a matter of concrete analysis of a concrete situation).

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

Translated by Stoffel Debuysere (Please contact me if you can improve the translation)

In the context of the research project “Figures of Dissent (Cinema of Politics, Politics of Cinema)”
KASK / School of Arts

translator’s notes
(1) The title of this piece is borrowed from James Agee and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941):
“For in the immediate world, everything is to be discerned, for him who can discern it, and centrally and simply, without a either dissection into science or digression into art, but with the whole of consciousness, seeking to perceive it as it stands: so that the aspect of a street in sunlight can roar in the heart of itself as a symphony, perhaps as no symphony can: and all of consciousness is shifted from the imagined, the revisive, to the effort to perceive simply the cruel radiance of what is.
That is why the camera seems to me, next to unassisted and weaponless consciousness, the central instrument of our time; and is why in turn I feel such rage at its misuse: which has spread so nearly universal a corruption of sight that I know of less than a dozen alive whose eyes I can trust even so much as my own.”
(2) JMS = Jean-Marie Straub. JLG =Jean-Luc Godard

Anabasis of Terror

eric-baudelaire-the-anabasis.JPEG

Anabasis of Terror — Trying (Not) to Understand
Pierre Zaoui

Originally written in the context of the exhibition “L’Anabase de May et Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi et 27 années sans images” by Eric Baudelaire (Delme, 20 May – 25 September 2011). The film with the same title was shown as part of the Reverberances programme @ Courtisane festival 2012.

“The sole and only work and deed accomplished by universal freedom is therefore death — a death that achieves nothing, embraces nothing within its grasp; for what is negated is the unachieved, unfulfilled punctual entity of the absolutely free self. It is thus the most cold-blooded and meaningless death of all, with no more significance than cleaving a head of cabbage or swallowing a draught of water”.
– Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

“I have behind me two or three coffins for which I will no longer forgive anyone.”
– Antonin Artaud, Rodez Notebooks

It is hard to imagine a more horrid and absurd act than the terrorist attack of May 30th 1972 at Lod Airport in Israel. Three Japanese kamikazes 5000 miles from home shot blindly into a crowd — mostly made up of Puerto Rican Catholics on a pilgrimage — in the name of the Palestinian cause and of world revolution. One is not quite sure whether to break into laughter or tears, so much does ridiculousness clash here with bloody abjection. So one wavers between Dostoyevskian moral repulsion (“Demons!”) and Monty Pythonesque disbelief (the Judean People’s Front in The Life of Brian comes to mind).
But one need only spend a little more time thinking about the twenty-six victims of that attack, the vile purges that preceded it within the United Red Army, their fascination with violence, and their total confusion between reality and images, between internationalism and nationalism, between freedom and death, to stop laughing altogether. These tragic excesses — not of a generation but of a few lost Japanese — are not fascinating; they are wicked, lamentable. A lament that forces us, symmetrically, to abandon any overly moral perspective. Because after all, in their own way these young members of the Japanese Red Army did not lack morality. At least, they lacked none of the courage, selflessness, loyalty to community, solidarity, sense of sacrifice and other virtues that are the stuff of the most common morals. And it is hard not to detect a profound moral regret in the fact that after this attack, none of their “operations” aimed to kill, as they got lost instead in pure terrorist spectacles. Search as one might, interpretation will always reach a dead end. There will be no “perfect” scumbags nor even “banal” scumbags, in Arendt’s sense of the word. So these terrorists do not inspire laughter any more than do their victims, because like them, they do not make good objects of mockery. The situation is a little more serious than that.
Here it is rather Hegel’s words describing revolutionary Terror that ring truer than ever: their liberation and revolution ideal was nothing but an ideal devoid of content, without mediation, a confusion between images and reality, feelings and reason, deprived of all feeling and all dialectical thought, which could only lead to “the most cold-blooded and meaningless death,” in reality as well as in images. In other words, the Lod attack and the whole associated story of the Japanese Red Army are not intolerable for aesthetic or moral reasons, but because they stem from a political sensibility and mindset that are essentially impatient. Indeed, as Hegel showed persuasively, beyond all morality, impatient sentimentality is the absolute worst political fault, much worse even than patient, well-considered Machiavellian cruelty. It is a disaster for the mind, taking the apparently highest and most generous thought of universality and reducing it to the most insignificant particularity. And it is also a disaster for the body, reduced at worst to the level of an obstacle without importance, at best to the level of an image without real content.
As true as Hegel’s judgment may seem, it is not necessarily wholly adequate for today’s world. First, because he could only formulate it after the event, from the perspective of a subsequent reconciliation between abstract freedom and concrete moral community, specifically the Empire, then the Hegelian constitutional state. But which subsequent reconciliation enables us to speak of those terrorist attacks of the 1970s? What have the Palestinian question and the chances for peace in the Israeli-Arab conflict become if not an endless despair? What has terrorism become today if not a sinister profession of the future? And if the revolutionary perspective has been discredited by bloody, loathsome acts, what has become of the thought on its underlying causes — oppression, inequality, poverty, exploitation?
Second, and most importantly, because Hegel claims to fully understand the terrorist act. That fury of abstract universality has a determined place in his system as a pause in the life of the spirit which must be overcome. Yet who can really claim to understand terrorism, no longer of the State but by various splinter groups? Claiming to fully understand it amounts to either condemning or excusing it, that is, contenting oneself to judge and therefore not really understanding anything at all.
In this respect, a more fruitful approach might be the kind taken by Eric Baudelaire, who aims to understand and not to understand at the same time––to understand up to the point that one no longer understands––and also to show, refusing to understand or explain, so that with a dreadful feeling of confusion we are surprised to find ourselves understanding, discovering a subtle sympathy, telling ourselves that maybe monstrosity is our shared condition. He sets before us a kind of ever-divided desire: the desire to understand and to not understand, the desire to understand what we do not understand and the desire not to understand what we are afraid of understanding all too well. Or it could be written: the desire (not) to understand, in its threefold sense — to see, to hear, and to share.

***

Where does this desire come from, if it rejects from the start not just all fascination, all nostalgia, but also any elevated position from which to pronounce “the” truth of the past? Perhaps from today, actually, from our latter-day reluctance to understand and not understand what happened and what was lost in those years of powder and lead. What went off the rails? Where? Why? We do not know. The unpardonable criminal failure of those young idealists of yesterday in no way clears us of our own failure, our current inability to offer anything more than talk of an unthinkable new departure and an impossible return. This could almost be expressed as a fake Zen proverb: the certainty that someone else is lost does not in any way guarantee that we have found ourselves, nor even that we have the ability at least to find ourselves.
Taking up the profound intuition of Alain Badiou, who sees in Anabasis — understood as an embarking, a wandering and a return — one of the possible symbols of the century that has (or has not) just ended, Eric Baudelaire suggests that we take another look at one of the movements that drove this modern form of anabasis to one of its highest levels of insanity: the Japanese Red Army.
It is a matter of being precise, however. Not about the idea of insanity, which explains both nothing and too much, but about this very notion of anabasis. Because what exactly is it about here? The anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu and that of Masao Adachi is, in truth, much more literal than Alan Badiou’s. His is a metaphor for a century’s wandering and returning, symbolizing the poetic space opened between Saint-John Perse’s lyrical anabasis and Paul Celan’s tragic anabasis. Eric Baudelaire is by contrast more mistrustful of poetry and metaphor. It is no refusal, so much are his silkscreen prints and his tracking shots of Tokyo and Beirut fraught with tragic poetic richness; yet more mistrustful. Or put otherwise: he is naturally on Celan’s side, deaf to the heavy pathos of the likes of Saint-John Perse. His anabasis does not try prophetically to speak the truth of a century, but circles around absent images of a crime, gropes among its traces, and focuses on those who were not so much actors as spectators of that atrocious expedition from Japan to Beirut and back again. A bit like in Circumambulation, one of his previous films, when he circled around Ground Zero with his camera: wanting to understand, circling, filming, wanting not to understand, refusing to see, his head lowered. And when it is a matter of anabasis, of a wandering and a return, maybe it is better to circle and film than to speak — the literality of images versus poetic metaphor.
For this reason, Eric Baudelaire is also much closer to Xenophon’s text itself. You could even say that he follows its sequence more precisely. What in fact does this so-called “march of the Ten Thousand” entail?
First the departure elsewhere of young men from all of over Greece, thirsty for adventure, glory and money. The elsewhere of that period was Persia, geographically the present-day Middle East. But the goal was already ancillary, mercenary; they were helping Cyrus overthrow his brother, much in the way that, mutatis mutandis, the Japanese Red Army placed itself at the service of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). No romantic indulgence here — not the call of the desert, nor the call of the road to the unknown. Anabasis is primarily the story of an initial confusion between thirst for the outside and mercenary interest.
Next, a wandering, when Cyrus dies in the battle of Cunaxa and the Greek army finds itself lacking any plan or goal. Victory no longer means anything more than warding off defeat. Both groups suffer deep solitude, leading to arguments, division, treason. The destitution of an uprooted herd. And nostalgia for the kingdom of water (Greece? Japan?): “thalatta! thalatta!”. And even worse, boredom. Xenophon is obviously not a great author. He loses himself in images, instead of getting down to construction and verisimilitude, and you get bored stiff reading his work, but it is doubtless a boredom worthy of what the Greeks experienced as they spent months crisscrossing foreign lands in search of some sort of sanctuary from despair.
But this is not a neutral wandering. It is not an intoxicating journey or a series of picaresque encounters, but an organized, compulsory crime. What can a routed army survive on if not plunder, pillage and murder? Even Xenophon could not hide this. At heart, Anabasis is the story of crimes that are paradoxically both necessary and pointless; a very strange war of conquest that has suddenly become defensive, the defense of self outside oneself, hunted conquerors, compulsory criminals that dream they are glorious heroes.
Hence the return. But it was far from being an organized retreat, however much Xenophon may have showered himself with praise at the time (his genius, his know-how, his prudence). It was more of a chaotic flight. How many men had set out? How many returned? Anabasis is a return to the same thing, worse off; it is the sterile dialectic of an enthusiasm and a disappointment that lead back to the point of departure, only burdened by a few more deaths and regrets. And even a collapse: returning not to one’s city steeped in glory, but instead home to Mother, or to no one if she is already in prison. Anabasis is not the tale of a ruin of the ruined, but of a ruin of ruiners, of people who are the chief architects of their own ruin. Once again, Xenophon is no Homer, and Anabasis is the poor man’s Odyssey.
Finally, an apology, a perpetual justification. No matter what some specialists say, Anabasis is essentially an exercise in self-justification. And there is no reason to reproach it for this, so well do we understand why. After surviving one’s own rout, what destiny can one hope for other than having to endlessly justify, to keep mulling over one’s crime, its necessity, the error it represents, and to bunker down behind one’s initial noble reasons? Especially when this justification coincides with a much greater rout, the collapse of Athens. Over subsequent centuries, Athenians were to recognize themselves in this story, which came to symbolize their destiny, and Anabasis was to enjoy considerable success. Understood in terms of its historical reception, it is thus no longer simply the tale of a few lost youths, but more the story of their rout at the heart of an even greater rout that was to mark the end of an era. Ruin within ruin, Athenians of yesterday just like people in today’s societies who are no longer quite sure who is manipulating who, or even for what reason (a past or a future? a private image or a collective destiny?). You would think that not only the failure but its vain justification had been — in itself and in face of an even greater failure — part of the plan all along.

***

There is no question then of giving in to a romanticization of anabasis, ancient or modern, nor to an unequivocal, too comfortable condemnation of its actors. They certainly had a wretched homecoming as criminals without glory, but we ourselves are still wandering, away from the scene of who knows what new and even viler crimes.
What is the good of such a realization? Is it nihilistic despair, or the same old song about impotent youth, forever spectators of a past that eludes them as much as the present? Maybe not, since this is where everything turns around, where we are seized by vertigo. Eric Baudelaire’s exhibition, in fact, is not a political analysis, it is an art exhibition. We are not dealing primarily with ideas, but with images and voices, images that are indirect, clouded, controlled, and manipulated in both senses of the word. Raw voices, neither judged nor decrypted (in the name of which higher code?). One cannot help thinking of the primitive gestures of contemporary art: of Duchamp diverting common objects and images, of Malevitch melting all figures into the abstraction of color. And of its original purpose: saving the concrete by means of diversion and abstraction (which no longer has anything to do with philosophical abstraction); saving the beauty of the world and the landscape by refusing its human, all too human aestheticization; saving art by denying it. In short, going back to an entirely different anabasis, that of contemporary art, which never stops searching for something new in the point of rout that leads to a return, a reprise, a remake.
So is this the vertigo of analogy, as Jacques Bouveresse would say? An infinitely doubtful vertigo that will end up placing the indistinct suffering of men, all men — Jews, Palestinians, Israelis, Japanese, Greeks, Puerto Ricans — at the service of artists? Absolutely not.
First, because if we accept Gerard Wacjman’s assertion in L’Objet du siècle (The Object of the Century) that contemporary art begins with Duchamp and Malevitch, we have no choice but to recognize that the anabasis image has a much longer history in art than in politics. If art’s interest in this image gives it meaning today, it is perhaps not so much as a lifeline, but as a disturbing mirror that shows a reflection of one’s time and at least provides food for thought. It was neither politics nor poetry that first modernized that ancient image of the anabasis, it was the visual artist working with images, conscious of their perpetual fall and resurrection in a world closed anew.
Moreover, it is hard to deny that in a sense today we live in societies of widespread anabasis where in art, politics and science, in the most public lives as well as the most private, we hear people speaking of nothing but that: of new departures and returns, of conquests and quagmires, of the loss and rediscovery of meaning.
Finally, because if we concede that the greatest wisdom consists in more than just “not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn,” to use Spinoza’s words, but also not to understand as Spinoza would rather have wished, only to convey everything that has happened, with all of the nebulousness and the nagging questions the past entails, then we have no choice but to recognize that art makes use of the past as much as it does not make use of it, makes use of the present as much as it diverts from it to find something new.
In any case, latching onto this anabasis image at least seems a little more interesting than speaking of a postmodern world, the end of history or a clash of civilizations. It allows us to avoid sterile contrasts between fervor and brooding. We have no choice, our age has set itself up between the two, and contemporary art was the first to understand this. And above all, this liberates us from all nostalgia for the past as well as all hope for a more glorious future. Our age is not a great one, and its art must therefore forbid itself from trying to be the greatest art, true art in the Hegelian sense or propaganda art like that of the last thurifiers of revolutionary terrorism. But although this lucid realization can liberate us from all of the garbage of grandeur — glory, fanaticism, sacrifice, war — the modest art of today, which Eric Baudelaire’s work embodies rigorously, deserves its fair measure of thanks. It is an art of peace, of questions, and a call for more sharing, instead of more judgment and conflict.

ARTISTS IN FOCUS: Sandra Gibson & Luis Recoder

gibson_recoder_small.jpg

ARTISTS IN FOCUS: Sandra Gibson & Luis Recoder
In the context of the Courtisane Festival 2012 (Gent, March 21 – 25).

Even though the often announced death of cinema may well be an overstatement, film seems irrevocably doomed. Nevertheless, or because of that reason precisely, a number of artists and filmmakers continue to stubbornly hang on to the film medium, as an inexhaustible source for magic and wonder. With their groundbreaking excursions into the realm of so-called “expanded cinema” Sandra Gibson (US, 1968) and Luis Recoder (US, 1971) have emerged as two of the most inspired and inventive film acolytes of their generation. Since their first meeting in 2000 they have been producing numerous installations and performances that make full use of the optical and mechanical qualities of film projection. Using 16mm and 35mm projectors, celluloid strips, deviating lenses and manual interventions they create elusive and hypnotic light sculptures, which transform the projection room into a sensual three dimensional experience. During the Courtisane Festival they will present their new performance as well as some installation works and a film programme that pays homage to the work of one of their principal “teachers”, Paul Sharits.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

gibson_recoder_perf.jpg

Performance
WED 21.03, 20:30 VOORUIT (DOMZAAL)

Aberration of Light: Dark Chamber Disclosure
Projector Performance by Sandra Gibson, Olivia Block & Luis Recoder

For the opening of the festival, Courtisane presents the new film performance by Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder. Their research on light as an optical phenom- enon revolves this time around the light play of two 35mm projectors, fractured and dispersed by a series of lenses. The performance makes the most of the in- trinsic properties of the “changeover” system which in film theaters is used to project two film reels the one right after the other. The result is a stimulating and enigmatic game of filmic illusion and desillusion. This is the second projects that Gibson and Recoder have created in collaboration with Olivia Block (US), whose sound work seeks to examine and redefine the limits of the cinematographic experience. Block began her jour- ney into music as a pop musician, until she turned to field recordings in the 1990s. Since then she has devel- oped a unique musical language, in which she brings to- gether refined textures of environmental material with raw noise and an elegant instrumental sound architec- ture, in which wind instruments are predominant. Com- positional ordering and digital processing enter into an absorbing dialogue with the natural world.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

sharits_colour.jpg

Carte Blanche to Sandra Gibson & Luis Recoder
FRI 23.03, 20:00 SPHINX

REPROJECTION: Paul Sharits and the analytical film

“I’m intrigued with parthenogenesis, which has some relation to the new film, and toyed with the thought of titling the film REPROJECTION; before then I had decided that since the film was being structured in a way which might be thought of as non-algebraically tautologic, I would title it PROJECTIONPROJECTION; now it seems better to return to my first title: either PRINT PROJECTION or simply PROJECTION.”
Paul Sharits (‘Correspondence with Stan Brakhage’)

Analytical Studies II: Unframed Lines
US, 1971-1976, silent, 25′

“Most of my films set up an experiential field wherein the film is not constantly imposing itself on you yet has enough consistency that you can “move through” yourself rather than just follow the development of the film. All the films have a little bit to do with meditation. These locational works become the ultimate field for that kind of contemplative reflection. It becomes like watching fireflies or water flowing over a dam – something that’s moving. A fire or a candle flame – it’s shifting – but it doesn’t change its form dramatically”. – Paul Sharits (‘An Interview with Paul Sharits’ by Linda Cathcart)

Color Sound Frames
US, 1974, sound, 26′

“Other works of the past few years are composed by rephotographing strips of “flicker” footage in a home-made system, wherein the projector element has no shutter blade Pokies or gripper arm and thereby allows the “subjects” – the “flicker” film strips – to be observed as continuous strips of film, with their sprocket holes visible; not only is there a natural horizontal and vertical division of the frame but there is also possible a layering of color planes (when the strips are projected at a rapid speed and rephotographed, their differently colored frames begin to blur into each other, forming whole ranges of shimmering color bars and planes, several appearing at a time within the frame, some assuming dominance – like fundamental tones – while others pulse around/behind the dominants, as if they were their overtones). The works which are made this way [i.e., Color Sound Frames] are certainly more complex than I have described them: because their images “move” at varieties of speeds, contain superimpositions, have sound elements (sync-soundtracks of the sprocket hole images’ rates of passage), etc., these factors also contribute to the films’ total “chordal fabrics.” – Paul Sharits (‘Hearing: Seeing’)

Razor Blades
US, 1965-1968, optical sound, 25’

“Projection Instructions: two 1000’ reels to be projected side by side onto one very large screen or two normal size screens / projectors should be identical, same focal length lenses, same intensity bulbs, detachable speakers / each reel has its own soundtrack and both should be played full volume and full treble / detachable speakers must be placed one on each side of the room, half way between screen and projectors, for stereo effect / synch ‘left’ and ‘right’ reels by aligning title / credits which appear at beginning of each reel / proper reels for ‘right’ and ‘left’ projectors indicated on head leaders.”

Declarative Mode
US, 1976-1977, silent, 38’

“Projection Instructions: 1. place 2 projectors close, side by side; do not load film yet. 2. turn on bulbs and find less intense bulb – use that faint bulb for the inner image (it is important that the inner image be dimmer; if necessary put a neutral filter of about 1 stop in front of lens). 3. you MUST HAVE AT LEAST ONE ZOOM LENS, so that one image can be put inside the other (the precise proportion is shown in a drawing accompanying the prints); another way of doing this is to move one projector forward until the right size is reached – but this cannot be done in a projection booth because there is not enough space. 4. make sure that inner rectangle is precisely placed so that the top and bottom borders and the sides are exactly equal – there should be absolutely no keystoning – this is of IMPORTANCE. 5. thread film and go to the punch mark on each reel. 6.ADVANCE THE FOOTAGE FOR THE INNER SCREEN 24 frames AHEAD OF THE REEL FOR THE EXTERIOR IMAGE – THIS SLIGHT OUT-OF-SYNC IS CRUCIAL TO THE EFFECT OF THE FILM. 7. start both projectors at the exact same instant. 8. FOCUS BOTH PROJECTIONS ON THEIR EDGES – the sharpness of the edges is also crucial.”

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

gibson_recoder_install.jpg

Film Installation
THU 22.03 – SUN 25.03, 14:00-20:00 FREE VOORUIT (BRUGZAAL)

Open Screening

“In our installation work, we use projected light to ar- ticulate space and time. Film projectors and celluloid are the material base of our constructions in light and shadow, the elemental properties of cinema. These things are deeply imbued with a history of viewership in the dark of the theater. To remove it from darkness is to flood this history and cast a certain illumination upon it. A certain exposure. Light spills in the shifting of film from its native darkness in enclosed chambers (camera obscura) to the uncanny openness and defamiliarized illumination of installation. We are exploring the shift, elaborating the displacement, recasting the light mechanics of a peculiar estrangement of the medium. The art of cinema, yes. But more timely: the becoming cinema of art. That is the coming attraction for us.” (Gibson/Recoder)

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

Masterclass
FRI 23.03, 13:30 KUNSTTOREN Gent

ARTISTS IN FOCUS: Ben Rivers & Ben Russell

riversrussell.jpg

ARTISTS IN FOCUS: Ben Rivers & Ben Russell
In the context of the Courtisane Festival 2012 (Gent, March 21 – 25).

Ben Rivers (UK, 1972) and Ben Russell (US, 1976) are not unkown to the Courtisane public: their individual work has been shown on many occasions at the festival. Longtime friends, they are currently working together on the film A Spell To Ward Off the Darkness, which has provided them with the perfect alibi for a series of side projects, including the installation and someday, somehow, before the end which will premiere at Courtisane. In a spirit heir to the postwar avant-garde cinema, they both use 16mm film as their medium of choice, sharing many other common interests and concerns, from counter-culture and anthropology to a fascination with the mystical and the utopian. This fertile combination is at the centre of their film work, a selfproclaimed “participatory etnography” which examines the possibility of a spiritual existence in response to a world that increasingly seems to draw closer to the secular. During the festival these themes and questions will serve as guidelines for a diverse range of public events, including an exhibition, an evening of performances and two screening programmes which Ben and Ben have set up in dialogue with each other’s work.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

lichens_600.jpg

Event Night
THU 22.03, 20:30 KUNSTTOREN

Ben & Ben: Beard Beat Triangle Worship

Ben & Ben’s idea of a night out, in the company of an assembly of kindred souls that propose a wide palette of kaleidoscopic sound excursions: from hypnotic drone mantras to neo-cosmic proto-acid and back. Robert aiki aubrey Lowe (US) aka Lichens is not only the leading actor in Ben and Ben’s new film, he also makes music that totally rhymes with the spiritual and mystical tonalities of their work. Using voice, guitar and modular synthesizers he layers sprawling sound patterns to epic drones, in which both the spirit of John Fahey as that of Demetrio Stratos habitate. Jake Williams (UK) is the protagonist of Ben Rivers’s feature film Two Years at Sea. He will bring his electric mandolin and promises a set of Scottish folk songs, bittersweet ditties and maybe even a cover of Lily Allen. Finally, the shadowy hours of the night are heralded by Antwerp-based Stellar OM Source (NL) aka Christelle Gualdi, who uses analogue synths and electronics to bridge the gap between the kosmische musik à la Klaus Schulze and the Detroit techno school.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

install-lake1.jpg

Installation
FRI 23.03-SUN 25.03, 14:00-20:00 FREE, KUNSTTOREN
VERNISSAGE THU 22.03, 19:00

And someday, somehow, before the end
2012, 3-channel looped installation, 6’30

A rehearsal for death(1) as a rehearsal for transformation(2) is a rehearsal for infinity(3).

1) “Call no man happy till he is dead.” Aeschylus

2) “It’s been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you there is no such message, no such home – only the millions of last moments… nothing more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments.” Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

3) “Effective magic is transcendent nature.” George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans), Middlemarch

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

sackbarrow.jpg

SUN 25.03, 15:30 SPHINX

Ben On Ben: Sack Barrow, or Don’t Let’s Forget About The Factory

“In which Ben Russell gathers together a short-list of seven films and videos that reflect the conceptual and material elements at play in the fabrication of Ben Rivers’ 2011 film Sack Barrow. Having observed his dear friend and occasional collaborator at work on the cinema production line for years and years, Russell seeks to offer a spot of invaluable insight (however speculative) into Rivers’ particular manufacturing process. The result, a metal-coated and smoke-filled twenty-one minute 16mm bit of wonderment, all toxic gas and British pin-up model and verité worker sympathy, will be projected for your eyes and ears at the end of the line. What precedes Sack Barrow is the fabrication of influence – a proposition for the alchemical combination of seven works, some of which Rivers has never seen, through which the emotion, spirit, and history of his practice can be seen to resonate. Thematic sub-topics include, but are not limited to: Industrial Flames, Animal Blood, Worker Paranoia, Empty Factories, Labor as Dance, Employee Theft, and Flatulence.”

riverrites.jpg

SUN 25.03, 17:30 SPHINX

Ben On Ben: River Rites, or If You’re Going To Do It This Might Be The Best Way

“In which Ben Rivers (that’s me writing about myself in the third person) tries to compile a programme of films based around what he thinks might be going on in his friend Ben Russell’s film River Rites. We have talked for years now about what it means to film people, how to not be on the outside but on the inside, though sometimes you have to stay on the outside in order to see clearly. What happens when you bring a camera into a place, and you knowingly place it facing in one direction instead of another, and you record images on film for ten minutes at a time, unbroken stretches of film that become trance. About lives lived alongside others, at work and play on the same piece of land or in the same stretch of river. About movie-magic – transformation tricks we play in order to find some other truth to the material, a world that exists in cinema and nowhere else. This programme points to some possible answers as to how we can make films with and about people.”

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

twoyears.jpg

FRI 23.03, 22:45 SPHINX

Ben Rivers
Two Years At Sea

UK, 2011, 16mm blown up to 35mm, b&w, sound, 86’

“A man called Jake lives in the middle of the forest. He goes for walks in whatever the weather, and takes naps in the misty fields and woods. He builds a raft to spend time sitting in a loch. He sleeps in a caravan that floats up a tree. He is seen in all seasons, surviving frugally, passing the time with strange projects, living the radical dream he had as a younger man, a dream he spent two years working at sea to realise. I made a short film about Jake five years ago, and as time has passed and other films have been made, I have had a continual feeling that I should go back—to make another film where I, and then the audience, can spend more time hanging around Jake’s place in the forest. I want the film to embrace the different perception of time that Jake and his environment have, which is much more patient and relaxed than my own urban living. The film will have at its core the relationship between a person and the place they have chosen to live out their life, and the deep connection there is between them.” (BR)

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

Masterclass
DO/THU 22.03, 11:00 KUNSTTOREN Gent

ARTIST IN FOCUS: Philippe Grandrieux

grandrieux1.png

ARTIST IN FOCUS: Philippe Grandrieux
In the context of the Courtisane Festival 2012 (Gent, March 21 – 25).
Additional screenings at INSAS on March 26.

Cinema as a sensual experience: this understanding is the basis of the extraordinary work of Philippe Grandrieux (FR, 1954). The French filmmaker, who studied at INSAS in Brussels, has made quite an impression during the past decade with feature films such as Sombre (1998) and La Vie Nouvelle (2002), but his idiosyncratic oeuvre also includes documentaries and video art works, many of which have never been shown in Belgium before. His cinematic vision is clearly inspired by the modernist ideas of artists such as Antonin Artaud and Jean Epstein, who saw in cinema the potential to grasp the essential power and brutal beauty of reality. As very few have, Grandrieux succeeds in inscribing the most archaic and primitive sensations in the materiality of the medium. This is a cinema that vibrates and shimmers: cinematic space is transformed into a plastic mass of light, sound, colour and movement, in which form and content, figure and ground, body and matter, the abstract and the figurative fuse. At the occasion of the festival, an extensive selection of his work will be shown in Ghent and Brussels, including the first part of the film series “Il se peut que la beaute ait renforce notre resolution”, which celebrates filmmakers who in the course of the last century dedicated their work and life to resistance and emancipation.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

adachi.png
SAT 24.03 15:30, SPHINX

Il se peut que la beauté ait renforcé notre résolution – Masao Adachi
FR, 2011, video, colour, stereo, Japanese and French spoken, English subtitles, 75’

“A to and fro between politics and cinema, between Trotskym and Surrealism, between armed struggle and screenplays, between Palestine, Lebanon and Japan, between the day-before-yesterday and today, between beauty and resolve, between the art of eating and that of being a father, such is the risky and precise life of Masao Adachi, the monsieur with the white hair glimpsed in his delusions. And this is just how Philippe Grandrieux, faithful to his way of doing things, decided to suggest his portrait, with no a priori, without interrupting speech, filming him and listening to his words without at first understanding them, framing him in a tight close-up that is sometimes underexposed, other times overexposed, to better abandon him later for: cherry trees in blossom, the streets of Tokyo swarming with cars and passersby, familiar objects and lactescent celling light. And from time to time, Grandrieux lets speak a few shots from his earlier films, from where suddenly crops up the phrase, Genet-like, given in the title: a paradoxical program that hesitates to connect one shore to the other”. (Jean-Pierre Rehm)

sombre.jpg
SAT 24.03, 22:30 SPHINX

Sombre
FR, 1998, 35mm, colour, French spoken, English subtitles, 117’

“There is something profoundly new about Grandrieux’s plastic exploration of violence, but also something very contemporary. His approach is not based on such editing and framing effects one finds and admires in Hitchcock and Ray, nor in an exploration of excess as in Tarantino. He works on the inside of an image, on the special relation between the luminous content and the vibrant and fragmentary figuration. Grandrieux may ‘tell’ the story of a serial killer in Sombre, but the violence is both removed from the story and heightened: it descends with its hero into the dark, in scenes of a carved-up female body, captured with a hand-held 35mm camera. As Raymond Bellour observes in his eulogy and lively defence of the film, ‘Pour Sombre’: [the camera places us] among the bodies, into situations of unmitigated suffering, in order to confront us, despite the brutality of the acts, with ambiguous content, in a constantly disrupted fusion”. (Christa Blümlinger)

lac.jpg
SUN 25.03, 13:30 SPHINX

Un lac
FR, 2009, 35mm, colour, French spoken, English subtitles, 85’

“Instead of the heavy 35mm camera painfully held on the shoulder for Sombre, it’s with a small DV camera (and all that it involves) that Grandrieux has shot Un Lac, with a freedom of mastered improvisation which is felt throughout the entire film (…). And thus the camera’s most directly sensitive recording capacity accompanies a will of great abstraction in the way that Grandrieux treats each of the components of the film, in the editing and the sound design, which is entirely constructed, as well as in the decision of lowering the level of light sensitivity, carefully respected from the shooting to the digital colourgrading and the blowup to 35mm. All of this seems to suggest that we are in front of a new way of negotiating the relation between the ‘two biggest trends in cinema, the design-tendency and the recording-tendency’. Serge Daney added ‘two ways of engaging the inhuman in the human’, explaining that it would be ‘in the middle, the ‘scene-tendency’ (…) that the inhuman is kept at a distance’.” (Raymond Bellour)

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

MON 26.03, 18:00 INSAS, Brussels

sarajevo.jpg

Retour à Sarajevo
FR, 1996, video, colour, Bosnian spoken, French subtitles, 70’

“Initially, this film was commissioned by Arte. The idea was to return to Sarajevo with Sada, a Bosnian woman who had spent the war in exile in Paris. As the work progressed, I realized that it was not that simple. That war had escaped me a bit, I was interested in how it could be done from Paris. It was a week after the Dayton Accords and the situation was definitely not stabilized, Sarajevo was still surrounded by the Serbs. At the same time, I’m not predisposed to be a war reporter, it’s not my story, this kind of fear does not excite me. We took one of the first busses that went back to Sarajevo and the trip was incredible. We crossed completely devastated landscapes: 300 kms of ruins between Split to and Sarajevo; a trip of countless hours through a piece of history that was absolutely shattered. We were arrested and controlled all the time, without any idea by whom. I’d never been physically in a war landscape. The film was an incredibly strong experience because it faced me with a certain responsibility, a commitment. If I had not been affronted with all these questions, with my own story and my relationship to history, perhaps I would have never embarked on a feature film. In that respect, this film seemed decisive. “(PG)

vienouvelle.jpg

La vie nouvelle
FR, 2002, 35mm, colour, English and French spoken, French subtitles, 102’

“There was an extremely simple, basic narrative premise: a young man meets a young woman and wants her for himself, in an Orphic way. Little by little the film was constructed in terms of intensity – relations of intensity between characters who could inhabit or haunt the film. There’s the impression that everything is moving all the time, like a kind of vibrant, disturbed materiology. That’s what we were looking for: a disquieting film, very disquieting, very fragile and vibrant. Not a film like a tree, with a trunk and branches, but like a field of sunflowers, a field of grass growing everywhere. Here’s the biggest rupture: in the way the film was conceived. It was conceived and developed on questions of intensity rather than psychological relations. My dream is to
create a completely ‘Spinoza-ist’ film, built upon ethical categories: rage, joy, pride … and essentially each of these categories would be a pure block of sensations, passing from one to the other with enormous suddenness. So the film would be a constant vibration of emotions and affects, and all that would reunite us, reinscribe us into the material in which we’re formed: the perceptual material of our first years, our first moments, our childhood. Before speech. That’s the impulse – the desire – which led to the film.” (PG)

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

Carte Blanche to Philippe Grandrieux
SAT 24.03, 17:30 SPHINX

bernhard.png

Edmond Bernhard
Dimanche

BE, 1962, 35mm, b&w, 20’

Too often forgotten and ignored, this is the master piece of Belgian filmmaker Edmond Bernhard, one of Grandrieux’s teachers during his studies at INSAS.
Dimanche was supposed to be a didactic film, intended to evoke the problem of leisure. Bernhard diverts the order and outwits the trap of the ‘thematic’ film. Without resorting to any form of commentary, making use of extraordinary images sublimating common spaces (the boredom of Sundays, the changing of the guard, children playing, a runner in the woods, a football match, …), he constructs with a nifty montage an exceptional work dealing with the sense of void and the fossilisation of the world.” (Boris Lehman)

dwoskin.jpg

Stephen Dwoskin
The Sun and the Moon

UK , 2007, video, colour, 60’

One of the most personal and intimate films by Stephen Dwoskin. A radical portrait of lust, pain and melancholia, at the same time lurid fairytale and autobiographical essay. “The Sun and the Moon, a film fairy tale, is about two women’s terrifying encounter with ‘Otherness’ in the form of a man, abject and monstrous, and for them to either to witness, accept or partake in his annihilation. All are caught in their own isolation and are fearful of the menace that has to be met. The film, as a personal interpretation of Beauty and the Beast, enciphers concerns, beliefs and desires in seductive images that are themselves a form of camouflage, making it possible to utter harsh truths.” (SD)

fassbinder1.png

Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Deutschland im Herbst (episode)

DE, 1977/78, 35mm, colour and b&w, 26’

Fassbinder’s contribution to the omnibusfilm Deutschland im Herbst, which attempted to portray the political climate in Germany in 1977 after the kidnapping and assassination of Hanns-Martin Schleyer by the Red Army Faction, and the subsequent “suicides” in Stammheim prison of three members of the Baader-Meinhof group. Exposing himself with frankness and brutality, Fassbinder conveys, in the words of Wilhelm Roth, “the feeling of powerlessness experienced by a left wing intellectual. It is not the political discussions that give this half hour its importance, but the brutality and honesty with which Fassbinder deals with himself as a man and a director.”

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

Masterclass
MON 26.03 13:00 Sint-Lukas Brussel

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————-
Avec le soutien de l’Ambassade de France en Belgique