Joris Ivens on António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro’s Ana

Translation from Joris Ivens’ diaries, 30 June 1983. Not included in the publication In the Midst of the End of the World: António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro.

I have not yet had the opportunity to establish the kind of dialogue I would like to have with António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro, the directors of Ana.

I remember their previous film, Trás-os-Montes, which was unforgettable.

Watching Ana was a great emotional experience. It is a film that elevates the spirit, with a sensitivity, a finesse and a very particular poetic conception of the image.

All the strength of the film is already in the synopsis:

In those days…
The legend of the milk in the somber house.
Inner time.
Almost silence.

More than a legend, it is a tale, a secret dream that haunts us long afterwards.

“Inner time”, but also that cosmic dimension that infiltrates the film, and that “almost silence”, it’s true, the silence runs through the whole space. The natural silence of the gestures of the characters, adults and children, of their gazes. A. Reis and M. Cordeiro recreate time without leaving reality aside, a reality that is always the true source of artistic work, they are always very close to that source.

Inside the somber house, the light highlights some dark places. There are impressive effects, and it’s not Rembrandt, it’s not de la Tour!

On the other hand, outside, the colours are strong: yellow, green, they give all the strength to the landscape. A grandiose landscape, sometimes you see a character in the distance, running or walking, and that’s how the space acquires this immoderation. This reminded me a little of classical Chinese painting, which places man in the universe. The image of man in relation to the cosmos is one of the most profound reflections of Chinese philosophy, which says: “Heaven gives, earth receives, allows to grow, and man accomplishes”. It seems to me audacious on the part of Reis and Cordeiro, who are very close to current reality, and at times close to the documentary, to introduce this cosmic notion.

In Ana there is a proliferation of symbols, symbols that are also signs, a code: a history, mythology and the wise discourse of the professor. A flash-back of five thousand years! And Reis and Cordeiro have the courage to go back in time and space, and tell us: they are the same, they are the same people, they are the same movements of humanity that, in the end, return in this house, it is the cycle of life: the mountains, the water, the river, the relationship of man with nature, with animals.

It can be said that A. Reis and M. Cordeiro recreate time. Inside, always punctuated by the acts of everyday life, the naturally slow rhythm of glances, of gestures. For example, when Ana’s son sees his dead mother’s grave. The most moving moment is the image of Ana’s granddaughter, with her back turned, her hands slowly sliding down the wall. Reis and Cordeiro do not show us her face.

This film is an exaltation of life, but it also speaks of death. The wineskin, the raft, the boat, so many human interventions over the centuries that continue to condition us to the idea of death.

The symbol of the boat, source of life and death, establishes an almost natural relationship with Ana’s death. At the end of her life, as if on a ritual journey, Ana heads for a round lake, which seems to have been inserted into this fixed, flat landscape. It is these kinds of visions that come to mind when one thinks of peaceful, serene things. Like when Ana walks up and down those high steps. The sound of her clogs sounds like a destiny, like a fatality. Also my advanced age makes me feel that fatigue. I can understand Ana’s movements very well, one would say they are slow, but in reality they are extremely just, efficient, precise and measured in order to economise her strength.

Reis and Cordeiro use the wind as a dramatic element and not as an artifice: the wind caresses the trees or whips them. For example, in the first shot of the tracking shot, Ana’s granddaughter runs with the wind. In the background, we see the gusts. It’s incredibly beautiful.

I like the silences in this film. I like the silence that invades the places themselves, even if for a long time they are burdened with the presence of the characters who left them.

A. Reis and M. Cordeiro work with exceptional talent the memory of this film. The back and forth between the past and the present of the old woman. Ana’s time never imposes itself as a sublimated flashback, but is superimposed, it fits in, as in the appearance of the young woman dressed in white.

In the Midst of the End of the World: António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro

António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro created one of the most singular bodies of work in the history of Portuguese cinema, deeply influencing its development. Made between 1974 and 1989, their films deal with rural communities, rituals, and landscapes, blending reality, fiction, ethnography and poetry into a lyrical evocation of the northeastern Portuguese region of Trás-os-Montes, known for its cultural, natural, and political specificities.

Following Courtisane’s multiple programs dedicated to the filmmakers’ work, this volume gathers a selection of texts for the most part available in English for the first time. It also includes interviews with Cordeiro and Reis conducted throughout the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, which map the filmmakers’ conception of art, film, and their own practice. This archival record is complemented with more recent sources, which provide a distanced, historical assessment of their work, as well as some newly commissioned critical texts and a smattering of poems and literary fragments that are featured in their films.

Published by Courtisane
In collaboration with Sabzian
Compiled and edited by Raquel Morais and Stoffel Debuysere

Special thanks to DGLAB / Cultura, Camões, IP – Portugal, the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network (EHCN), Instituto do Cinema e do Audiovisual (ICA) and Cinemateca Portuguesa-Museu do Cinema for their support.

Order HERE.

Doc’s Kingdom 2024 – Ways of Listening // Reader

Reader published on the occassion of Doc’s Kingdom 2024 – Ways of Listening, curated by Stoffel Debuysere. Edited by Catarina Boieiro. Graphic design by Ana C. Bahia.
This reader was offered to participants. Please mail me if you want me to send a (digital) copy.

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Introduction

The present seems to increasingly impose itself as a moment in perpetual crisis, with one calamitous happening piling on another. A moment of impasse, when the sense of history appears to be frozen out of the future – as if we’re stuck in repeated viewings of tragedy and catastrophe, while the powers and principles that govern the world are unabashedly revealing themselves in technicolor. Our time feels as what we might call survival time, a time of struggling, drowning, holding onto the ledge, constantly adjusting to newly proliferating pressures to scramble for modes of living on. In a time where any notion of future feels unnavigable, how do we maintain our sea legs? How can we develop a wandering absorptive awareness that assembles material that might help us to clarify our way? How can we move on with a sense that the world is not only intensely present but also full of possibility, beyond our dominant and domineering imaginaries? How shall we re-open mystery in our times?

At the beginning of Noise, his treatise on music as a herald for social change, political economist Jacques Attali proclaimed: “For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing… Today, our sight has dimmed; it no longer sees our future, having constructed a present made of abstraction, nonsense, and silence. Now we must learn to judge a society more by its sounds, by its art, and by its festivals, than by its statistics.”1

What if we, much against the grain, take Attali’s suggestion to heart? What if we start listening past the presumption of visuality as the primary conveyor of meaning, past the adoption of measure and metre as the ruling value mechanism for our lives? What if we were able to reframe the prevailing visibility and temporality of our world by developing a sonic sensibility, by attempting to approach what Chris Marker once called “a vision that defeats the eye”? Couldn’t this sensibility possibly help us to question the fixed and imperial coordinates of the real and augment our critical imaginations, allowing us to emerge from under the shadow of inevitability?

”Sound’s reality,” writes Salomé Voegelin, “is not bound up in the absolutes of rationality and neither is it a trivial fiction. It is the reality of the invisible and the ephemeral, a reality that defines the actuality of the world as process, as a ‘zone of passage’, that engages relational and contingent truths, which are the possibilities found among affects, sentiments, the unpredictable, the imperfect and the incomplete. Sound generates a possible reality that does not represent a singular actuality but renders the real a mobile and unseen complexity. It makes the how of the dominant appreciable and sounds the minor, the suppressed, the hidden and the ignored.”2

Ways of Listening sets out to study sound in all its ephemeral invisibility and mobile intensity, in search for forms of sonic knowledge – a knowledge of the sonically perceptible and the barely audible, of the invisible and what remains unheard, of the unsound and the resounding. Listening serves as the main mode of engagement throughout this seminar, inviting us to lend our ears and bodies to silence as well as noise, to speech as well as what is not said, in and out of the bounds of sense and nonsense. Listening as a way of thinking with and through sound, opening up to a sea of wandering, to drifting, to ambiguity and fragility – which is not the same as futility. A listening-out for the overlooked and invisibilised, for blindspots and oversights, illuminating the limits and contradictions of the dominant sensible and sensual orders. A listening to work and to the world in order to discuss their relationship on a continuum of actuality and possibility.

Our aim is not to replace vision as such with listening as such. The seminar’s more profound aim is to move from the present with all its taken-for-granted beliefs about vision and experience and to move toward different understandings of experience, grounded in what Voegelin has called the “invisible formlessness of sound”. By opening time and space for a deeper consideration of the human sensorium that is informed by the auditory, we hope to shed some new light on audio-visual relations, in particular related to sound in or as documentary. While ocularcentrism and representationalism are still hegemonic within the study of the audio-visual, a re-evaluation of the sonic has been well underway. How do sound and its reproduction allow and disturb the frame or boundary of the visual? How can the sonic mitigate and, perhaps, transform the violence of objectified visuality? But also, how can we diversify the deafening homogeneity and sterility of existing attitudes and discourses regarding sonicality and aurality, in relation to historicity and coloniality, subjectivity and identity, sensoriality and accessibility?

In other words, how can we cultivate what Dylan Robinson has called a “critical listening positionality” – which “seeks to prompt questions regarding how we might become better attuned to the particular filters of race, class, gender, and ability that actively select and frame the moment of contact between listening body and listened-to sound”?3

These and many other questions will surface and resonate throughout our five days of study. “Study” can be considered here as what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten have called “a mechanism of and for attunement,”4 implying an orientation toward the world with no predictable shape or rhythm, an openness and attentiveness towards otherness, a feeling-with rather than a feeling-about. A sense and practice not granted, attunement suggests an operation of resonance, found in the spaces it travels, occupies, and generates. Only possible by way of gaps and encounters, resonance “sets into motion and sustains all creative processes”, according to Trinh T. Minh-ha.5 With this seminar we hope to create a resonance space where there are no clear demarcations between listening and thinking, words and sound, sociality and discursivity, a space which not only enhances our sonic sensibility, but also our sonic relationality. A space in which we can anchor ourselves and one another in the act of listening, allowing for a resonant being together in a whirlwind of creative encounters.
Welcome to Doc’s Kingdom 2024!

1. Jacques Attali, Noise (Presses Universitaires de France, 1977, translated to English in 1985).
2. Salomé Voegelin, The Political Possibility of Sound: Fragments of Listening (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019).
3. Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (University of Minnesota Press, 2020).
4. Stefano Harney, Fred Moten, “From Cooperation to Black Operation”, Transversal Texts, April 2016.
5. See “An Acoustic Journey” further in this Reader.

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CONTENT

* Presentation – Marcia Mansur
* Ways of Listening – Stoffel Debuysere

Trinh T. Minh-ha
* An Acoustic Journey – Trinh T. Minh-ha
* Listening Like a Documentary – Pooja Rangan
* Tuning in to the Music of the World: Conversation with Trinh T. Minh-ha – Stoffel Debuysere

Trevor Mathison + Gary Stewart
* Untimely Meditations: Reflections on the Black Audio Film Collective – Kodwo Eshun
* Twilight City: Outline for an archaeopsychic geography of New London – Kodwo Eshun
* Conversation with Gary Stewart and Trevor Mathison (Dubmorphology) – Michael McMillan

Ernst Karel
* Sonic Archive Fever: Ernst Karel and Veronika Kusumaryati’s Expedition Content – Stephanie Spray
* Expedition Content and the Harvard Peabody Expedition to Netherlands New Guinea, 1961 – Veronika Kusumaryati, Ernst Karel
* Conversation with Ernst Karel – Joshua Minsoo Kim

Susana de Sousa Dias
* (In)visible Evidence. The Representability of Torture – Susana de Sousa Dias
* Reconstructing the Repressed Visual Archive. Interview with Susana De Sousa Dias – Iván Villarmea Álvarez, Nieves Limón Serrano

Matilde Meireles
* On Vanishing Points – Matilde Meireles
* Multiple Perceptions of the Everyday Unfolded – Matilde Meireles

Alison O’Daniel
* Compensation and Transfiguration. Alison O’Daniel’s The Tuba Thieves – Jordan Lord
* Experiencing Noise – Marina Peterson
* Alison O’Daniel on The Tuba Thieves – Natalia Keogan

X-Ray Hex Tet Reader

For the programme Echoes of Dissent (Vol. 5) // X-Ray Hex Tet (19 – 20 October 2024, Les Ateliers Claus Brussels) and the research project Echoes of Dissent (KASK & Conservatory / School of Arts Gent), we compiled a reader.
Reader compiled by X-Ray Hex Tet. Edited by Stoffel Debuysere. Design by Ran de Vos (In Vitro). In collaboration with Les Ateliers Claus, Courtisane, Auguste Orts and In Vitro, with the support of VGC (Vlaamse Gemeenschapscommissie) and Q-O2. 
This reader was offered to participants. Please mail me if you want me to send a (digital) copy.

CONTENT

1. Nathaniel Mackey, ‘All Day Music’. From Nathaniel Mackey, Double Trio, New York: New Directions (2021).
2. Gregg Bordowitz & Fred Moten, ‘Precedent’. Transcribed from Some Styles of Masculinity Book Launch with Gregg Bordowitz & Fred Moten (October 2, 2021). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udCjZGTEwkw&t=788s (13’08-18’17).
3. Stuart Hall, ‘Conjuncture’. Transcribed from Stuart Hall: Through the Prism of an Intellectual Life (2004). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jY4Ve_r1PHU (media foundation transcription).
4. Nathaniel Mackey, ’14. VI. 78’. From: Nathaniel Mackey, Bedouin Hornbook (From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate: Volume 1), Lexington : University of Kentucky (1986).
5. Excerpt from Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning. Legitimate peripheral participation, Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press (1991).
6. James G. Spady, ‘Interview with Sylvia Robinson’. From James G. Spady, Charles G. Lee, H. Samy Alim, Street Conscious Rap, Philadelphia, PA: Black History Museum Umum/Loh Pub (1999).
7. Aurelia Martín-Casares and Marga G. Barranco, ‘The Musical Legacy of Black Africans in Spain: A Review of Our Sources’, Anthropological Notebooks 15, no. 2 (2009).
8. Anne Carson, ‘On the Total Collection’. From: Anne Carson, Short Talks, Brick Books (1992).
9. Excerpt from Crystabel Riley, ‘Skincare/Uncare’, Beauty Papers (online) (2018).
10. Abstract from Cristiana Costa da Rocha, ‘The Limits between Exploration and Slavery in the Carnauba Wax Cycle’, Belo Horizonte 77 (2020).
11. Jacques Derrida, ‘The Law of Genre’ (Trans. by Avital Ronell), Critical Inquiry 7 (1980).
12. Marie Prince, The history of Mary Prince: A West Indian slave. Related by herself (1831)

汾阳的喧嚣 Ironic Resonance, Anti-sound Design and Radical Cacophony in Jia Zhangke’s 小 Xiao 武 Wu

The interrogation of the relationship between cinema and politics is predominantly associated with the visual domain, where the politics of the audio-visual is all too often reduced to the politics of the image. The publication series Echoes of Dissent aims to parry the hegemony of the eye, and subsequent disregard for the ear, by examining the relationship cinema–politics from a sonic perspective.

Echoes of Dissent #2: 汾阳的喧嚣 Ironic Resonance, Anti-sound Design and Radical Cacophony in Jia Zhangke’s 小 Xiao 武 Wu by Morgan Quaintance. Published by Courtisane in March 2024.

The publication series is initiated and edited by Stoffel Debuysere, in the context of the research project with the same title at KASK & Conservatory / School of Arts Ghent.

Publication available via Courtisane bookshop