Category: Curated Programs

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

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

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)

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

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).

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

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)

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

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).

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

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).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SCREENINGS
FILM-PLATEAU, Sat 02.04.2010, 20:30

20:30 ROBERT FENZ SELECTION PART 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

22:30 ROBERT FENZ SELECTION PART 2

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

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

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

OPENING NIGHT OF THE FESTIVAL
KASK, Wed 30.03.2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————-
SCREENINGS
FILM-PLATEAU, Sat 02.04.2010

13:00 : SHORT FILMS BY SYLVAIN GEORGE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Every epoch dreams the next one”
— Walter Benjamin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

16:45 L’IMPOSSIBLE

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

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

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————-
OPENING NIGHT OF THE FESTIVAL
KASK, Wed 30.03.2011

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

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

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

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

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

Here We Are Now

13 October 2010, 21:00. Beursschouwburg, Brussels.
A Courtisane event, in the context of the S.H.O.W. (Shit Happens on Wednesdays) series. Free entrance, plus food & drinks & Courtisane DJs.

To what extent can we still make a difference between “public” and “private”? According to philosopher Jean Baudrillard, “the one is no longer a spectacle, the other no longer a secret”. Now that the most intimate details of our lives are thoughtlessly shared on the internet and the media, in order to feed an endless, compulsive loop of information, participation and circulation, it seems like ever more constraints and obstacles are being annulled. Surrounded and obsessed by a world of images, overcome by a gnawing insecurity, we submit ourselves to a regime of ultimate visibility. We are well aware of being seen, followed and remembered, but that is precisely what pushes us to all kinds of forms of disclosure, confession and “selfploitation”. The mediatised gaze of the other, at the same time disturbing and stimulating in its elusiveness and omnipresence, has become the paramount point of reference for our obsessive search for identity and belonging. We show ourselves in order to become ourselves, while we irrevocably disappear behind our images. The uncanny transit zone where intimacy merges into transparency is the central theme of this programme. Four recent video works, each in their own way, explore the contemporary conjunction of media and subjectivity, in which it seems no longer possible to maintain an unequivocal relationship between watching and showing, subject and object, seeing and being seen.

With works by Mohamed Bourouissa, Olivia Rochette & Gerard-Jan Claes, Ruti Sela & Maayan Amir, Shelly Silver

Olivia Rochette & Gerard-Jan Claes, Because We Are Visual (BE, 2010, 47′)
A brooding glance in to the world of online video diaries, circulating in the deep shadows of YouTube and related platforms. There we find a never-ending stream of micro-confessions and intimate exposures, teenage angst and moody blues, broken hearts and timid souls in search for comfort and belonging. It doesn’t matter if essentially there is nothing to say nor show, as long as it contributes to the driving flow of information. Anything can be said, everything must be disclosed, to the point that there is ultimately nothing left to see. It does not matter if nobody watches or listens, what matters are the traces we leave behind in our endless search for identity and significance. What matters is mattering itself. Looking for an answer to our loneliness and insecurity, overwhelmed by the omnipresence of images, we become images ourselves. Instead of looking for an object, rather than looking at ourselves as objects, we become objects ourselves. We immerse into the shadow play of the web, only to sink deeper into a trap of pointless circulation and forced visibility. Here we are: desperate bodies without desire, crude visuals without necessity or consequence. Welcome to the spectacle of banality.
(See also related post)

Mohamed Bourouissa, Temps Mort (DZ/FR, 2009, 18′)
“There is something fragile in this project, which mirrors the fragility and fugacity of the process itself of making the images. Every image has been made with the help of a friend who is in prison. Situations are established and filmed with a mobile phone, hence the poor quality of the images. If I insist upon this fragility, it’s because it contains the whole idea of the work. This video puts forward the intimate and at the same time distant, relationship between two persons, one free and the other one in captivity; between a real human relation and a digital communication; between a prison system which puts a person in the situation of fundamental isolation, of retraction in a closed space; and a free circulation : a profusion of information turning him into a member of the “media community”. We enter an “off screen” kind of free space. And at the same time, it’s the encounter between two temporalities, one slowed down, stopped, frozen by the prison environment, and the other one fast, dazzling, in constant movement. That’s why I chose the title ‘Temps mort’, for these images are in that duality of time being close and very distant at the same time”. (Mohamed Bourouissa)

Shelly Silver, What I’m Looking For (US, 2004, 15′)
“‘I am looking for people who would like to be photographed in public revealing some part of themselves (physical or otherwise). This is for an art project. No other relationship will take place outside of being photographed.’ My ad received many responses, mostly from men. After they initiated contact, I would set up a meeting where I would try to capture photographically whatever these people wanted to show me. Early on I realized that much of what they wanted to reveal couldn’t be contained in still photos, and I started integrating these images into a video. The fifteen-minute video is a riff on this adventure, a somewhat fictionalized version of the strange intimacies and connections formed between my subjects and I. (…) It is the first video I’ve made utilizing the internet, both as subject and resource and I was amazed by the incredible richness of interaction possible on the web, the unexpected play of fantasy, projection and desire as well as how boundaries between public and private are navigated differently than in actual physical space. When I moved, with my camera, from virtual to the actual space, I found my focus turning to the central importance of evidence of the physical world; exulting in the lush intimacy of details, the wrinkles on an ear, the spidered veins in the white of an eye, the elegant curve of the nape of the neck, the irregular rhythm of crooked front teeth…” (Shelly Silver)

Ruti Sela & Maayan Amir, Beyond Guilt #1 (IL, 2003, 9’30”)
The first part of a video trilogy, in which Ruti Sela and Maayan Amir focus on and play with the distorted power relationship between the photographer and the photographed subject, between the public domain and the private sphere. Sela and Amir proceed through the underworld of Tel Aviv’s busy nightlife, its dark night clubs and musty hotel rooms, unveiling, through a stimulating game of provocation and exposure, the influence of media on the expressions and compulsions of subdued drive and desire. This video documents their meetings in the toilets of pick-up bars with youngsters who talk to the camera about their sexual escapades and fantasies. Under the seemingly banal surface of their revelations lies the deep influence of the Israeli political and military apparatus (and the ideological positioning towards what Israelis euphemistically refer to as “hamatzav” – the situation), which unrelentingly permeates the most intimate spheres of their psyche.

ARTIST IN FOCUS: Paul Clipson
Live soundtrack by Ignatz & Paul Labrecque
25 September 2010, 20:00. Palais des Beaux-Arts / Paleis voor Schone Kunsten, Brussels. Organized by Courtisane & Bozar Cinema.

The elegantly ravishing super 8 films of Paul Clipson (US) are lyrical explorations of light and movement. His images, mostly edited in-camera, reveal the rhythms, energy and sensuality of the everyday that we often fail to see. The influence of experimental filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage, Marie Menken, Bruce Conner and Bruce Baillie is palpable in his multi-layered studies, as well as that of the many sound artists and musicians with whom he has collaborated over the years, such as Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Gregg Kowalsky and William Fowler Collins. For this occasion, a selection of his recent film work will be accompanied live for the first time by Bram Devens (alias Ignatz, BE) and Paul Labrecque (alias Head of Wantastiquet, Sunburned Hand of the Man, US). Both musicians draw their exorcising sound explorations from the tradition of “American Primitivism”, where the dreaded, uncompromising ghost of John Fahey dwells.

Filmmakers Statement

“My approach to making films is to bring to light subconscious preoccupations that begin to reveal themselves while filming in an improvised, stream of consciousness manner. Aspects of memory, dreams and recordings of the everyday are juxtaposed with densely layered, in-camera edited studies of figurative and abstract environments vast and small, all within a flowing formal and thematic experimental aesthetic that encourages unplanned-for results.

Maintaining a predominantly intuitive process in conceiving and creating films, where improvisation, utilizing mistakes, and “wrong” images (for example images that are overexposed or out of focus) are part of my filmmaking methodology, I’m less concerned with a preconceived end result and more with being immersed in a visual exploration of the moment. I employ a mainly handheld camera, often set at the two extremes of the focal spectrum, macro and telephoto (extreme macro close-up, extreme long shot), which maximizes the saturated textures of Super 8mm, the format I most frequently shoot in. The films are a personal recording, like a diary or essay, rendering color, light, focus and shadow in many forms, in the hope of allowing for un-thought, unexpected elements to reveal themselves.

To a large degree, the editing in the films is “in camera”, meaning that many of the shots and their order are as they were conceived at the time. Many of my films are the result of collaborations with sound artists or groups, such as Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Gregg Kowalsky and Joshua Churchill, all of whose methods of experimenting with sound and instrumentation, incorporating improvisation, mistakes and accidents into live performances and recordings, have greatly influenced my work.

I initially create 40-60 minute films, shooting rapidly and almost daily, to collect specific thematic and formal elements as they occur to me. The films are often screened at live musical performances (in the Bay Area and at international music venues) with the largely “in-camera” edited footage in its most effective order. These performance screenings provide me with an exciting environment in which visual and sonic permutations can be studied for future films. There’s no discussion or effort made by the musicians I collaborate with to synchronize or edit the films in a way that will better suit their being experienced by the audience. Over time, shorter film pieces, such as ECHO PARK (2007) or SPHINX ON THE SEINE (2008), are carefully created from this work, utilizing the accidental, unexpected juxtapositions of sound and image that have been discovered live. Along with the influence of experimental filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage, Marie Menkin, Bruce Conner, and Bruce Baillie, many of my recent discoveries and journeys as a filmmaker are the result of my work with musicians and bands.”