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″
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’
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”
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
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Sarah Vanagt
Little Figures
2003, video, b/w, sound, multiple languages spoken, English subtitles, 15′
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’
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.
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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”
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′
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’
‘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.
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Herman Asselberghs
After Empire
2011, HD video, colour, sound, English spoken, 52′
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.
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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’
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’
‘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.
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Eric Pauwels
Violin Fase
1986, 16mm to video, colour, sound, 12’
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”
“’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’
’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.
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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”
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′
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′
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.
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Henri Storck
Images d’Ostende
1929-1930, 35mm, b/w, 12’
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’
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)’.
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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
