Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia

cinephilia.jpg

“For me, film criticism is not a way of explaining or classifying things, it’s a way of prolonging them, making them resonate differently”
– Jacques Rancière

How to write about cinema today? “For whom? Against whom?” wondered French critic Serge Daney in a fervent 1974 plea for the rethinking of the critical function of Cahiers du Cinéma at the time. For the late Daney, beyond all possible aesthetic criteria and related ways of assessment, film criticism always implied an intervention in the political or ideological arena. From this point of view, it is not enough to simply explain what is being told in a film – a tendency in most contemporary film criticism – it is at least as important to lay bare where, how and by whom it is told. With his emphasis on the ethical dimension of cinema, Daney was explicitly following the footprints of the cinephilic tradition, based on the idea that each cinematographic work represents a voice and a standpoint, a vision of the world that at the same time legitimises and organises the work. This is the critical guideline that Daney, self-proclaimed “ciné-fils”, would follow his whole life, from the glorious days of the “Cahiers Jaunes” in the 1960’s, through the political and social deadlocks of the 1970’s, to the confrontation with the expansion of television and information in the 1980-90’s. Today, almost two decades after his death, a question resonates unrelentingly: where to find the “critical function” Serge Daney devoted his life and work to ? What is left of the cinephilic thought, now that the way we understand and experience cinema has undergone such fundamental transformations? In other words, what does the contemporary cinephile stand and fight for in the post-cinematographic era?

Following the publication of the first Dutch translation of the writings of the influential French film critic Serge Daney (published by Octavo), BAM organises a series of events on the state of cinephilia and film critical thinking today in collaboration with Sint-Lukas, KASK and RITS and with the support of Bozar, ERG and Courtisane (curated by Stoffel Debuysere). During the months of October and November, and in conjunction with three masterclasses by Adrian Martin (20.10), Jonathan Rosenbaum (27-28.10) and Jacques Rancière (18.11), eight participants will be initiated into the problematics of film criticism in the course of a workshop led by Dana Linssen and Pieter Van Bogaert. At the occasion, Courtisane has launched the website www.cinefilie.be, where all the information on the project will be regularly published.

Looking Outward, Looking Inward

pm_still1.png

Looking Outward, Looking Inward
New audiovisual essays from Belgium

KASKcinema, 28-29 September 2011, 20:30.

For the opening of the new film season at KASK Cinema, Courtisane is proud to present two evenings of recent films and videos by five young Belgium-based artists whose previous work has been screened at the Courtisane Festival in recent years, including the avant-premiere of Viva Paradise by the twice Courtisane winner (in 2008 and 2010) Isabelle Tollenaere and the Flemish premiere of Sung-A Yoon’s first feature-length documentary film Full of Missing Links. Looking ‘outwards’, the four films transport us to Tunisia, Cyprus, Israel and Korea, proposing personal variations on the form of the audiovisual essay.

The filmmakers will all be present at the screenings.

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

WED 28.09.2011, 20:30

vivap_small.jpg

Isabelle Tollenaere
Viva Paradis

2011, HD video, 16:9, color, stereo, 17’15’’

Viva Paradis captures a moment in a land, Tunisia, in the midst of transformation: an abandoned luxurious hotel, the ruins of Carthage, the traces of the recent revolution. The fight has been fought, but how to proceed further now? Focusing on the tourism industry, the film portrays this transitional phase in a series of long sequence shots. Everything seems to stand still. The result is a succession of troubling tableaux which suggest conflicting emotions, evoking the complexity of the situation. Banal entertainment and revolution, or how they can blend into one another.

pulsation_small.jpg

Pieter Geenen
pulsation

2011, HD video, 16:9, color, stereo, 14’30”

Imprinted on the mountains of Northern Cyprus, the landmark of a Turkish Cypriot flag identifies the landscape. Ever present and visible from almost every part of the island, this flag acts as a provocation to the Greek Cypriots who live on the other side of the UN buffer zone since the military division of Cyprus. pulsation shows a nocturnal view over the city of Nicosia, looking from Greek to Turkish Cyprus, with the flag rising above the city. When the night falls, it starts resonating like a strong heartbeat, both in vision and sound. In pulsation the view of the flag is united with the sound it actually generates right on the spot where it is stretched out on the slopes of the northern mountain range.

pm_small.png

Sirah Foighel Brutmann & Eitan Efrat
Printed Matter

2011, 16mm & HD video, 4:3, color, mono & stereo, 29′

Printed Matter displays the conflation of private lives and contemporary geopolitics. The evidence comes from Brutmann’s father, André, who was, up to his untimely death in 2002, a freelance press photographer covering two decades of Middle East news. His collection offers a visual chronicle of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that consists of surprisingly familiar images of civil dissent, armed violence, funeral grief and political speeching in both Israel and the Occupied Territories. After becoming a dad in 1983 and finishing a day of work, with a few pictures left on the film role in his camera, this professional media worker would regularly photograph his family. Printed Matter simply shows an exquisite selection of contact sheets including memorable events such as the First and Second Intifada, the assassination of Yitzchak Rabin and the birth of Sirah Foighel Brutmann. Instead of using formatted captions, the filmmakers choose for the impromptu voice comment by the first witness to these histories: Hanne Foighel, André’s partner and freelance journalist, reminisces on the past while browsing through its records and getting her memory triggered. As if it were a fragile time capsule steered by her provident off-screen voice, Printed Matter takes its viewers on a still yet penetrating excursion into the intimacies of political history and the politics of intimate lives.

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

THU 29.09.2011, 20:30

foml_small.jpg

Sung-A Yoon
Full of Missing Links

2011, HD video, 16:9, color, stereo, 68’

Yoon Sung-A travels to South-Korea in search of her father whom she hasn’t seen since the age of eight. While she attempts to understand her parents’ break-up, which would tear her from her land and take her to France (and Belgium later on), the filmmaker unravels the fabric of Korean society through the prism of her own story. First and foremost personal, her quest is a reflection of the preoccupations of a country profoundly marked by separation.

Figures of Dissent : Pasolini

pasolini-web.jpg

Figures of Dissent : Pasolini
8 – 9 June 2011, KASKcinema, Gent. A Courtisane programme.

“It has been said that I have three heroes: Christ, Marx and Freud. This is reducing everything to formulae. In truth, my only hero is Reality. If I have chosen to be a filmmaker as well as a writer it is because, rather than expressing reality through those symbols that are words, I have preferred the cinema as a means of expression – to express reality through reality…”
— Pier Paolo Pasolini

“Maintenant, avec le recul, je me dis que la mort de Pasolini est une bonne date pour dire que, à partir de là, le cinéma a arrêté d’être explorateur, d’être lui-même, c’est-à-dire apprenti sorcier.”
— Serge Daney

The death of Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975), as Serge Daney once suggested, marked the end of an era: a certain history of cinema seemed to tiredly come to a halt. Cinema understood as a communal place where to come together and disagree, as an open space for exploration and confrontation (mise-en-scène as well as mise-en-crise) is no more – or at least no longer with the scope of former days. However, the critical and polemical tone that once indicated the vitality of the seventh art has always continued to resonate in Pasolini’s work. Today, in the grooves of the 21st century, his voice appears to resound with the same vigor of old, when he sent cold shivers to the world of the 1960’s and 1970’s. The recent wave of retrospectives, restorations, updates and reprises proves how strongly the countertone of Pasolini – filmmaker, poet, author and true dissenter at heart – is to be missed more than ever before in today’s consensual times. Pasolini’s self proclaimed role, in the words of art critic Guy Scarpetta “was to subvert conceptions of the dominant world, to explore all that is not said by conventional representations, to uncover all that is repressed in the social and cultural consensus.” This programme celebrates his outspokenly rebellious character with the screening of two rarely shown and recently restored documentaries by Pasolini, as well as works by two contemporary artists who each in their own way reinvigorate his legacy: Alfredo Jaar and Ayreen Anastas.

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

Wed 08.06.2011, 20:30: PROGRAMME 1

pasolini-jaar-web.jpg

Alfredo Jaar
Le Ceneri di Pasolini (The Ashes of Pasolini)

IT/CL, 2009, video, b/w & colour, stereo, Italian with English subtitles, 38’
Copy courtesy of the artist

The Ashes of Pasolini is a modest film about the death of an extraordinary intellectual. It is mostly based on documentary material discovered after 1975, the year of his death, and before. As you know, it is still unclear who killed him. But for me, it has always been clear why: it was because of fear. Fear of his voice, fear of his life style, fear of his ideas, fear of his opinions, fear of his intellect. Pasolini was the complete intellectual: a filmmaker, a poet, a writer, a journalist, a critic, a polemicist. He was totally involved in the cultural and political life of his time. As an artist he took risks, broke the rules, he created his own rules. Pasolini wrote one of the most beautiful poems of the 20th century titled ‘The Ashes of Gramsci’ (1957), a eulogy to another great Italian thinker, Antonio Gramsci. The title of my film is based on this poem by Pasolini but I chose it to write a eulogy to Pasolini himself. In these dark times in which Italy finds itself, Pasolini’s voice is sorely missed.” (Alfredo Jaar)

“Why a tribute to Pasolini in 2009? … In the middle of the Berlusconi era? The answer is in Pasolini words, in his voice. It’s such a contemporary voice that we can hardly believe that these words were pronounced almost half-century ago. We are surprised when we realize how his words are directly pertinent, not just to Berlusconi’s Italy but to our current condition. […] My short film The Ashes of Pasolini it’s a montage of excerpts of his films and interviews, as well as RAI news footage. Also, I have included images shot in Casarsa, the small village where he was buried. My main aim was to revive his voice in the XXIst century, where it belongs.” (Alfredo Jaar)

pasolini-rabbia-web2.png

Giuseppe Bertolucci & Pier Paolo Pasolini
La Rabbia di Pasolini (The Rage of Pasolini)


IT, 1963/2008, 35mm, b/w and colour, stereo, Italian with English subtitles, 83’

Print courtesy of Cineteca di Bologna

“In 1962, Pasolini was invited by an Italian newsreel producer to create a feature-length film essay from his company’s library of footage. Inspired by diverse wealth of imagery, Pasolini set out to make a film as ‘a show of indignation against the unreality of the bourgeois world.’ Assembling images from the Soviet bloc and various anti-colonial movements as complement and contrast to the newsreel footage, Pasolini crafted a remarkable tour de force of politically trenchant commentary on the modern world, climaxing in a moving meditation on the death of Marilyn Monroe. Fearing controversy and box-office failure, the producer ordered Pasolini to cut the original version to less than an hour and then promptly added a right-wing counterpart by the filmmaker Giovanni Guareschi, packaging the two parts as one film. Disowned by Pasolini, this version was indeed a failure. Although Pasolini’s original version remains lost, an ambitious reconstruction was recently completed by Giuseppe Bertolucci and the Cineteca di Bologna using the shot list and a dialogue transcript from the first version, as well as Pasolini’s notes on music for the film.” (Harvard Film Archive)

“A hundred elegiac pages in prose and verses, and a texture of moving images, photographs and painting reproductions: in the laboratory of the film La Rabbia, Pier Paolo Pasolini experimented for the first time with a narrative style different from the traditional and conventional documentaries of the time. His intention was – in his own words – to create a ‘new cinema genre. An ideological and poetical essay through new sequences.’ La Rabbia had to be ‘an act of indignation against the unreality of the bourgeois world and its consequent historical irresponsibility, to testify to the presence of a world that, unlike that of the bourgeoisie, is deeply rooted in reality. And reality implies a true love for tradition that can only be achieved through revolution.’ (…) The project was born from the proposal of a small producer, Gastone Ferranti, who entrusted Pasolini with the file material of a newsreel called ‘Mondo libero’, which he had directed and produced for a number of years. During an interview with Maurizio Liverani (‘Paese sera’, April 14th, 1963), Pasolini declared: ‘I pulled vision out of that material. It was horrendous, wretched, a depressing portrait of international populism, the triumph of the most trivial reactions. However, in all this terrible squalor, every now and then, beautiful images would grab my attention: the smile of a stranger, two eyes expressing joy and sorrow, and interesting sequences rich with historical significance, visual fascination in black and white’.”(Roberto Chiesi)

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

Thu 09.06.2011, 20:30: PROGRAMME 2

pasolini_notes_web.jpg

Pier Paolo Pasolini
Appunti per un’Orestiade Africana (Notes for an African Orestes)


IT, 1970, 35mm, colour, stereo, Italian with English subtitles, 63’

Print courtesy of Cineteca di Bologna

“While shooting Medea, a film about the subjugation of the ancient world to an alienating modernity, Pier Paolo Pasolini developed the idea to make a companion piece about another Greek myth – the story of Orestes. This story would end more happily, with the archaic making way for a different kind of modernity, built not on exploitation but on communalism. Encouraged by emerging socialist governments in post-colonial Africa, Pasolini hoped to shoot his film there, and so he went to Uganda and Tanzania to scout for locations and actors. That footage became the basis for this film, with Pasolini explaining his ideas on the soundtrack. A perfect example of leftist intellectual auto-critique, the film climaxes with Pasolini discussing his plans with a group of African students in Rome. The discussion hovers somewhere between tragedy and farce as one by one, the students calmly and kindly offer numerous reasonable objections to Pasolini’s idea, all of which he seems to take in stride. The Oresteia project was never made. Little-seen and little-discussed, the film is essential viewing for understanding Pasolini’s political thinking and his attachment to myth.” (Harvard Film Archive)

“Orestes synthesizes African History over the last hundred years: the sudden and almost divine passing from a ‘savage’ state to a civil and democratic one. The series of kings, who dominated the African lands (and who in their turn were dominated by the dark Erinyes) in the atrocious and century-old stagnation of a tribal and prehistoric culture, have suddenly been swept away. And Reason, almost motu proprio, has established democratic institutions. We must add that now, in the sixties, the years of the ‘Third World’, the years of ‘negritude’, the burning problem and question is the transformation of the Erinyes into Eumenides. Aeschylus’ genius foreshadowed all of this. All advanced people today agree that archaic civilizations – superficially referred to in terms of folklore – must not be forgotten, despised, or betrayed. Rather, they ought to be absorbed within the new civilization, integrating it, making it specific, concrete, historical? The terrifying and fantastic divinities of African prehistory should undergo the same process as the Erinyes, they should become Eumenides.” (Pasolini)

pasolini_anastas_web.jpg

Ayreen Anastas
Pasolini Pa* Palestine

US/Palestine, 2005, video, colour, stereo, Arabic with English subtitles, 51’
Copy courtesy of the artist

Pasolini Pa* Palestine is an attempt to repeat Pasolini’s trip to Palestine in his film, Seeking Locations in Palestine for The Gospel According to Matthew (1963). It adapts his script into a route map superimposed on the current landscape, creating contradictions and breaks between the visual and the audible, the expected and the real. The video explores the question of repetition. For Heidegger Wiederholung ‘repetition, retrieval’ is one of the terms he uses for the appropriate attitude toward the past. “By the repetition of a basic problem we understand the disclosure of its original, so far hidden possibilities.” The project ventures a conversation and a dialogue with Pasolini, especially his ‘Poem for the Third World’. Discutere ‘to smash to pieces’ is the Latin source of dialogue, discussion. The piece does not criticize Pasolini, but reveals unnoticed possibilities in his thought and works back to the ‘experiences’ that inspired it.” (Ayreen Anastas)

“From: Ayreen Anastas
Sent: Dec 2, 2003 4:22 PM
To: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Subject: Sopraluoghi in Palestina per il film “Vangelo Secondo Matteo”

Dear Pier Paolo,

I am writing to ask your permission to repeat your seeking in Palestine film 40 years ago in the film: Sopraluoghi in Palestina per il film ‘Vangelo Secondo Matteo’.*

In this repetition, I would like to find in that landscape what you have not found in your film. Your refusal of the Palestinian landscape makes me sad: a refusal that is a negation and affirmation at the same time: it is a negation because you did not execute ‘The Gospel According to Matthew’ in Palestine, and an affirmation in the sense of the necessity of a repetition of this venture, trip, seeking etc… only in that gap of not finding the location in Palestine in your film 40 years ago, I can start seeking them in the new film today.

So it is not a real sadness if I say: I am sad that you did not decide for this landscape and for locations there. It is rather a symbolic sadness, that will help me find an unnamable (an unknown that actually motivates the project) in that landscape I grew up in. It is a sadness of love, a double love, for you as a director and for this landscape.
(…)

* Seeking Locations in Palestine for ‘The Gospel According to Matthew'”

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

VIDEOEX

ve_afterempire.jpg

In the context of the Videoex Festival (21-29 May 2011, Zürich (CH)), on the occasion of this year’s special focus on “guest city” Brussels, Courtisane presents four programmes of Belgian works. Curated by Stoffel Debuysere & Maria Palacios Cruz.

Here and Elsewhere
Between here and there, between near and far, lies a world of difference, delineated by an immeasurable horizon. One must overcome the distance, scan the horizon, interrogate and broaden up one’s perspective. The five video essays in this programme each in their own way reflect on the encounter with the other and the unfamiliar. At the same time, the gaze is directed into the outer world and onto oneself, slowly surveying the impenetrable and complex reality that surrounds us all.

Johan Grimonprez
Kobarweng, or Where Is Your Helicopter?

1992, video, colour, sound, English text, 24’30″

ve_kobarweng.jpg
Pepera, Indonesia. Less accessible areas in the highlands on the island aren’t visited by the white outside world until the war in the South Pacific, when a plane skims over or crashes in the forest. Around 1959 a child sees how a helicopter drops food parcels over the region. Years later he asks the filmmaker who visits him in the OK Bon Valley: “Where is your helicopter?”. Combining found footage, tense silence, text quotes from the ethnographical classics and his own account of this surreal encounter Grimonprez deconstructs the anthropological notion of ‘first contact’”.

Els Opsomer
imovie[one]_: THE AGONY OF SILENCE

2003, video, colour, sound, English text, 13’

ve_agony.jpg
Ramallah – Gaza city – East-Jerusalem, Palestine. After a short visit to the Occupied Territories, the artist sits at her computer and she ‘writes’ a video-letter with the amateur-software iLife to the people she got to know. She films the images she photographed: her own souvenirs are subjected to a detailed investigation, her own considerations are closely scrutinized. Subtitles show the content of the letter in which she asks questions, contemplating and in a quiet voice, about the preservation of human integrity in an area where physical and psychological violence takes place every day”.

Vincent Meessen
L’empiètement du coton graine (the Intruder)

2005, video, multiple languages spoken, English subtitles, 7’30”

ve_intruder.jpg
Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Meessens’ ‘document brut’ records his actions in the busy streets of the African capital with a candid camera. Dressed and masked in a cotton tuft costume he silently moves between the crowds. The reactions soon follow: the white man as a strange, primitive apparition is faced with indifference, mockery and amazement. His use of Burkinabese ‘white gold’ as a garment turns the public space into a magnetic field,charged with poetry based on unspoken symbolical, political and economic meanings

Sarah Vanagt
Little Figures

2003, video, b/w, sound, multiple languages spoken, English subtitles, 15′

ve_figures.jpg
Three statues on the Mont des Arts in Brussels: a king, a queen and a medieval knight. Three newcomers to Brussels: a Philippino boy, a Rwandan refugee girl and a Moroccan boy. Three statues, three children; an imaginary conversation.” In ’Little Figures’ Sarah Vanagt once again plays with her passion for history, perspective and social commitment. Setting out from a location, the ‘Kunstberg’, but specifically the three statues located there, Vanagt puts together a story in which migrant children stir up a conversation between the statues, in an often surprising and witty tone, being (un)able to situate them historically. It is no coincidence that colonialism and the crusades emerge as references. The scene has a decelerated, halted aspect, which reinforces the feeling of recollection, and allows for associations to surface.”

Florence Aigner & Laurent Van Lancker
Disorient

2010, 35mm, 16mm & Super8 on video, colour, English and French spoken, English subs, 36’

ve_disorient.jpg
A polyphony of tales by migrants who return to their homeland after having lived abroad. Whether they are Vietnamese, Indian, Syrian, Iranian, Chinese, Pakistani, academics, contract workers, political refugees, businessmen or students, they all are confronted with a second exile: coming home. They also share the capacity to analyse the differences between the cultures they have lived in with humour, critical distance and lived experiences. This experimental documentary moulds this polyphony of tales in a minimalist, impressionistic form. Only a few traces of images, of travelling, of material culture, appear above the voices and soundscapes, just as there remain only shadows and memories of their presence abroad. This film is the condensed result of a long-term project – around twenty interviews conducted in different Asian countries and a series of subtle laboratory work including scratching the film tape – which evokes the reminiscences of the memories and traces of life of the encountered protagonists.

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

Politics of Perception
Contemporary image culture is marked by an ubiquitous preoccupation with transparency and signage: between image and signification there is no longer room for doubt, let alone for void. To look means in first place to decode, to intuitively verify clichés, stereotypes, visual information that refers to nothing else than to itself. Today showing and seeing cannot be regarded as self-evident anymore. What we are left with is merely a ghost of the image: imagination.

Annik Leroy
Cellule 719

2004, video, colour, sound, English text, 14’30”

ve_cellule719.jpg
In ’Cellule 719’ there is hardly an image to be seen, sometimes we catch a glimpse of water in some corner, but for the most part this film is black. The lines appearing on-screen in grey are derived from ‘Ein brief Ulrike Meinhofs aus dem Toten Trakt’, a letter written by member of the RAF Ulrike Meinhof in 1972 when she had just been emprisoned. In 1976 she was found dead in her isolation cell with the number 719. From the lines an enormous disenchantment and signs of depression become apparent, but at the same time they have great poetical value. Because of the consistent blackness, the undefinable sound in the background and the concentration on the probing lines, the spectator penetrates into Meinhof’s head for over fourteen minutes.

Pieter-Paul Mortier
In the Midst of…

2005, video, colour, sound, English text, 19′

in-the-midst-of-08.jpg
Seeing is above all a matter of recognition. Mortier manipulated amateur images by a tourist to the extent that it becomes hard to identify anything. Fragments, shadows, echoes, doubled images, distortion of sound: never the pictorial impact is stable or complete. The same technology that produced the image, also deconstructs it. One of the sources of inspiration is a quote from ‘The Elementary Particles’ (Atomised)’ by Michel Houellebecq: “Natural forms are human forms. Triangles, interweavings, branchings, appear in our minds. We recognize them and admire them; we live among them. We grow among our creations human creations, which we can communicate to men-and among them we die. In the midst of space, human space, we make our measurements, and with these measurements we create space, the space between our instruments.”

Pieter Geenen
atlantis

2008, video, colour, sound, 11’

ve_atlantis.jpg
‘atlantis’ shows a nocturnal landscape being scanned by a lightbeam. The searchlight of a boat on the Chinese Yangtze river explores the banks of the Three Gorges Reservoir, which came into existance due to the construction of the controversial Three Gorges Dam. Just before it would flood up to its final level of 175m this lightbeam reveals what soon is going to disappear below water level. Referring to the concentrated lightbeams in typical images of underwater discoveries and explorations, this video seems to explore a sunken universe, a land of which people seem to have left, with demolished and abandoned buildings, desolate forests and ghost ships.

Herman Asselberghs
After Empire

2011, HD video, colour, sound, English spoken, 52′

ve_afterempire3.jpg
A search for the alternative to an image of meaning, inspired by Antonio Negri’s and Michael Hardt’s ‘Empire’. The insights from this politico-philosophical study on the contemporary world serve as a starting point for a reflection on positive forms of collective resistance and emancipatory representations in times of war. An adaptation that doesn’t aim to be an illustration of Empire but that reworks it in the light of the 9/11 heritage. After Empire considers a possible alternative for the iconic image that our collective memory has kept as the quintessential moment of recent history: the hijacked plane hitting the second tower. The alternative: the 15th of February 2003. On that day 30 million citizens across the planet marched against the unilateral decision by the American government to start a pre-emptive war against Iraq under the auspices of “the war on terrorism”. 2/15 was the greatest peace demonstration since the Vietnam war and probably the biggest protest march ever to take place. The war did happen, but this world day of resistance could very well mark the beginning of the 21st century. 2/15 instead of 9/11: a key date in the writing of a history of global contestation in the struggle between two superpowers: the United States against public opinion worldwide.

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

Defining Features
Five intimate observations, meticulously sculpted from time and space, resonating between perception and sensation. Cinematographic portrait as evocation, rather than reproduction. The face, the body and the voice as landscapes of the possible, as entry points into mental spaces that go beyond every enclosed form of representation. It’s the tangible gaps between presence and absence, gesture and lack, expression and silence, which throw us back onto ourselves, to the question of what it means to be human, body and spirit, existence and substance.

Chantal Akerman
La Chambre

1972, 16mm, colour, silent, 11’

ve_chambre.png
In ‘La Chambre’ (shot by Babette Mangolte), the camera takes in a room in 360-degree pans; a woman (Akerman) lies eating an apple. Offscreen voices reflect, in a kind of verbal counterpoint, the “mirror” into which the young woman informs us she is looking. A film of enclosure and repetition. Adrian Martin writes: “Akerman provides a mirror for our own activity as spectators, as we negotiate the illusions and lures of narrative.”

Manon de Boer
Sylvia Kristel – Paris

2003, Super8 to video, colour, sound, French spoken, English subtitles, 40’

ve_kristel.jpg
‘Sylvia Kristel – Paris’ is a portrait of Sylvia Kristel , best known for her role in the 1970’s erotic cult classic ‘Emmanuelle’, as well as a film about the impossibility of memory in relation to biography. Between November 2000 and June 2002 Manon de Boer recorded the stories and memories of Kristel. At each recording session she asked her to speak about a city where Kristel has lived: Paris, Los Angeles, Brussels or Amsterdam; over the two years she spoke on several occasions about the same city. At first glance the collection of stories appears to make up a sort of biography, but over time it shows the impossibility of biography: the impossibility of ‘plotting’ somebody’s life as a coherent narrative.

Eric Pauwels
Violin Fase

1986, 16mm to video, colour, sound, 12’

ve_violin.jpg
A solo in two movements, dance and camera. Eric Pauwels twirls the camera around the body of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker. What we see is not the geometrical and minimalist choreographic structure, but a possessed woman, bathing in sweat, exploring the boundaries of physical exhaustion. A solo in two movements: the dance and the camera. Four uninterrupted takes. Pauwels is constantly looking for the essence, the soul of cinema. In its explicit presence the camera is also driven to its extreme, perspiration, hardship. Pauwels is not concerned with beautiful shots, but with the investigation.

Olivier Smolders & Thierry Knauff
Seuls

1989, 35mm, b/w, sound, 12’30”

ve_seuls.jpg
“’Seuls’, consisting of portraits of a few children encountered in a psychiatric institution, breaks with all language constituted in discourse. This short film treats autism in a moving and violent way. The children are approached with a total respect of their integrity. The opacity of their story remains intact. We will only know of them the intensity of devouring gazes, the wavering of bodies, the schock of a head hitting the wall. And it makes us tremble inside. Maybe there is in this documentary fiction the warm apprehension of a silent fire, the paradoxal but simply human approach of communication.” (Serge Meurant)

Sven Augustijnen
Johan

2001, video, colour, sound, Dutch spoken, English subtitles, 24’

ve_johan.jpg
’Johan’ is a purely documentary film that shows the therapy undergone by a patient suffering from aphasia. Aphasia is an illness that affects the language centres of the brain and that can be generated by, amongst other things, a brain-tumour or -haemorrhage. Patients suffering from aphasia are often subject to chronic memory loss, and due to the ensuing semantic or interpretative disturbances they cannot recognise as such or correctly categorise certain specific objects. With the beginning of Sven Augustijnen’s film, the camera and the filming process themselves go to comprise some aspect of the therapy, thereby itself functioning as feedback for these media.

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

Forgotten Frontiers
Far too often forgotten in their own country, ignored in their time: this has been the fate of the rare manifestations of “avant-garde” film in the history of Belgian cinema. And yet, many of these films display a cinematographic insight and creativity that have nothing to envy to the canonical masterworks of the European art scenes. The ideas and formal considerations cultivated by the different avant-garde movements were not simply imitated, but ingeniously appropriated and transcended, resulting in singular and uncompromising film studies which combine formal experiment with poetic sensibility.

Charles Dekeukeleire
Combat de Boxe

1927, 35mm, b/w, 7’30”

ve_combat.jpg
When Charles Dekeukeleire makes ‘Combat de boxe’ (Boxing Match), he is 22 years old and obsessed with cinema. He immediately aligns himself with the defenders of pure cinema, Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein, Marcel L’Herbier, Louis Delluc. He also admires Vertov and his conception of the Kino-Glaz, the cameraeye. A poem by Paul Werrie served as starting point for this film which is based on a high-speed montage, close-ups, superimpositions, the successive use of the negative and positive image and the principle of rhythm. The violence of the fight, the presence of the audience, the tension between the crowd and the ring are swept up in a dazzling choreographic montage.

Henri Storck
Sur les bords de la caméra

1932, 35mm, b/w, 10′

ve_bords.jpg
Just like he did for ‘Histoire du soldat inconnu’ (Story of the Unknown Soldier), Storck uses newsreels from 1928, which he distorts, although in a more humanistic and slapstick way. He combines images of the crowd, police repression, explosions, riots and fire with images of gymnasts, music halls, models and sea lions, which make it all the more disturbing.

Charles Dekeukeleire
Impatience

1928, 35mm, b/w, 36′

ve_impatience.jpg
An introductory title informs the spectator that the film will be composed of four series of images, “the motorbike, the woman, the mountain and abstract blocks”, elements which serve as the starting point for Dekeukeleire to construct his film according to very precise parameters. The rhythm is given by a mathematical fragmentation of the film’s running time, divided up into temporal segments where the four repertories of images succeed each other in every possible combination with no respect for either melodic line or dramatic tension.

Henri Storck
Images d’Ostende

1929-1930, 35mm, b/w, 12’

ve_ostende.jpg
One of Storck’s early films. It is structured in visual chapters: the port, anchors, the wind, the spray, the dunes, the North Sea … a series of images that have nothing to do with anecdote or explanation. Each shot is at the very heart of the definition of the word involved. It could be said that this is the first film of conceptual experimentation. Shot after shot (the montage is quite rapid), Storck offers a glimpse of a fragment, an aspect that orders its multiple constitutive elements. They invoke their cinematographic equivalents, light, framing, the scale of the shots, movement, rhythm. The water, the sand, the waves are an integral part of a cinematic language. This is what Germaine Dulac and her friends would have called pure cinema. A poetic and kinetic shock, without fiction or sound, which relieves film from its narrative obligation and restores it to the world of sensations that it alone is able to carry. An immediate masterpiece that was one of the foundations of Storck’s way of seeing things.

Edmond Bernhard
Dimanche

1962, 35mm, b/w, 20′

“’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 subilimating 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)

Chantal Akerman
Saute Ma Ville

1968, 16mm, b/w, 13’

ve_saute.jpg
Chantal Akerman’s world is hermetic and private, but scenic. Especially the home is often the closed space where her characters (all of them women) become visible unto themselves, and are confronted with their own obsessions. Akerman was merely 18 years old, when she in 1968 made her debut with the anarchistic ‘Saute ma ville’, where she herself performs as a housewife on thin ice in the cheerful kitchen, in a revolutionary teenage parody of the cramped conditions of petit-bourgeoisie. With Chaplin and Godard as role-models, the young Chantal throws everything overboard, but at the same time navigates squarely towards the disaster of her own disintegration. Reality is looming outside the four walls of the home, with a force that really becomes visible in her later works. But a surprisingly large number of her constant topics can already be discerned in this film. The objective everyday formalism of the black-and-white images contain a feminist critique of domestic routines, which reduce the existence of a housewife to a clumsy and lonely ballet of habits and repetitions, and which are unbearable to observe with others, which Akerman ends up turning into the main principle a few years later in her chief work ‘Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles’ (1975)’.

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

The Videoex festival will also present works by many other Belgian filmmakers, including Marcel Broodthaers, Boris Lehman, Anouk de Clercq, Kurt D’Haeseleer, Nicolas Provost, Bernard Gigounon, Olivia Rochette & Gerard-Jan Claes, Potential Estate and others. Full programme: www.videoex.ch

ARTIST IN FOCUS: Robert Beavers

beavers-early.jpg

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).

beavers-ruskin.jpg
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)

beavers-suppliant-1.jpg
”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)

beavers-pitcher.jpg
“…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”

www_menken_bagatellemaas1.jpg

Ute Aurand
India

DE, 2005, 16mm, colour, sound, 57’

dscf3151.jpg

“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.

beavers-early2.jpg
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).

beavers-work-done.jpg
”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).

beavers-amor.jpg
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.
beavers-winged.jpg
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).

beavers_fromthenotebook.jpg
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).

beavers-painting.jpg
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).

beavers-wingseed.jpg
“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.

beavers-sotiros.jpg
“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).

beavers-efpsychi.jpg
“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).

hedgetheatre1.jpg
“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).

beavers-ground1.jpg
“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).