ARTIST IN FOCUS: Robert Fenz

part-2-the-space-in-between.jpg

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

part_1_lonely_planet_fenz.jpgwadada3.jpg
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’

fenz_france_1.jpg
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’

part_4_greenville_ms_fenz.jpg
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.jpg
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’

part_5_foreign_city_image_one.jpg
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’

perfect.jpg
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’

vakantie.jpg
“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’

tttt-ville.jpg
“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′

vertical_air.jpg
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

sylvain2.jpg

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

sylvain-george-qrer-hamid-croix-2.jpgwilliam_parker.jpg
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’

sylvain-george-qrer-doigts-brules.jpg
“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’

npsvn-victoire-poing-croise.jpg
“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’

no-border-assis-sur-un-matelas.jpg
“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’

ils-nous-tueront-tous-2.png
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′

image_afrique_50-small.jpg
“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’

a-caca-manoel-de-oliveira.jpg
“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’

gianikian.jpg
“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

je-me-suis-arme-contre-la-justice-3.jpg
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’

ea06-figures-3.jpg
“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’

un-homme-ideal-image-tv.jpg
“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

rochetteclaes_oliviagerard-jan_film_03-800x0.jpg

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

rochetteclaes_oliviagerard-jan_film_01_druk01-800x0.jpg
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)

bourouissa.jpg
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)

what-im-looking-for.jpg
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-and-maayan-amir-beyond-guilt-1-9min-video.jpg
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

clipson_blog.jpg

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.

clipson-event_41.jpg
clipson-event_2.jpg
clipson-event_1.jpg

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.”

Memories of the Future

brain.jpg

Memories of The Future
Friday June 25th 2010, Arts Centre Vooruit, Gent (BE). Free entrance

The rapid rise of digital network culture has a fundamental influence on the construction of our personal and social memory. The technologies used today to register, organise, find and share information have thoroughly changed our relation to past and present, but also the dynamics between remembering and forgetting. Consequently, the role and function of traditional memory institutions such as the museum, the library and the archive call for a reconsideration.

Now that it has become more and more easy to store and share information, new media promise not only an expansion but even a replacement of human memory. At the same time, there is a growing awareness that the accessibility and readability of information is increasingly dependent on different fast-changing layers of technological and social mediation. At first sight, we seem to be caught between two doomed visions: a future in which it will become impossible to escape from a digital mode of remembering and being remembered; and a society which remains attached to traditional preservation and memory practices and therefore is rendered blind to an important part of our history. How to find a new balance?

This conference intends to examine the role and notion of memory within a digital culture. What are the new memory forms developing today, hovering between the physical and the virtual, the local and the global, the formal and the informal, remembering and forgetting? What do the new memory paradigms represent for the social function and responsibility of memory institutions? What strategies can they– in the light of the expansion of information and memory industries – put in place to continue playing a lasting role in the public sphere? And finally, what are the implications for our use of digital resources – from a personal, educational, scientific or industrial perspective – as well as for the way in which we confer meaning to them? In other words, how can the traces of the past find a new place in the present, as a promise to the future?

Memories of the Future is organised in the framework of the IBBT research project Archipel by IBBT/SMIT, FARO, BAM, Universiteitsbibliotheek Gent in co-operation with vzw Waalse Krook. In Archipel universities, heritage institutions, arts organisations and technology companies study the potential of a sustainable digital archive infrastructure in Flanders. Archipel is supported by IWT (Agency for innovation by Science and Technology).

Speakers: Geoffrey C. Bowker, Peter B. Kaufman, Geert Lovink, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Andrew Payne, Richard Rinehart. More info and registration here.

Geoffrey C. Bowker (US) is Professor and Senior Scholar in Cyberscholarship, University of Pittsburgh iSchool. For the past five years, he has been serving as Executive Director and the Regis and Dianne McKenna Professor at the Center for Science, Technology and Society at Santa Clara University (CA). His main research interests are in the field of classification, standardization and interoperability, in particular asking how these play into the development of scientific cyberinfrastructure. He has written Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (MIT, 1999, with Susan Leigh Star) and Memory Practices in the Sciences (MIT, 2005). He is currently working on a book about how to read databases – how to recognize the social, cultural and moral values that are embedded in their construction and how to scope the range of possible emergent stories and the range of stories which cannot be told.

Peter B. Kaufman (US) is president and executive producer of Intelligent Television, a New York based production company investigating new production and distribution models for video projects, and exploring how to make educational and cultural material more widely accessible worldwide. He has been researching, amongst other things, Commercial-Noncommercial Partnerships in the digitization of cultural heritage materials and possible business models for networked cultural and educational institutions. He has been involved in various think tanks, such as the World Policy Institute and the Center for New Media Teaching and Learning at Columbia University. Occasionally he serves as an expert advisor on access issues to the Library of Congress’s Division of Motion Pictures, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound.

Geert Lovink (NL) is a mediatheorist and net critic. He is a co-founder of initiatives like Adilkno (Foundation for the Advancement of Illegal Knowledge), The Digital City, Nettime and Fibreculture. In 2004, following his appointment as Research Professor at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam and Associate Professor at University of Amsterdam, he founded the Institute of Network Cultures, which aims to explore, document and feed the potential of socio-technological evolutions. Recent research subjects include the role of the search engine in our culture (Society of the Query), Wikipedia (Critical Point of View) and internet video (Video Vortex). Lovink’s essays about network culture have been published in Dark Fiber (MIT, 2002), My First Recession (MIT, 2003) and Zero Comments (Routledge, 2007).

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger (AU) is Associate Professor of Public Policy and Director of the Information + Innovation Policy Research Center at the LKY School of Public Policy / National University of Singapore. He is also a faculty affiliate of the Belfer Center of Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. His work focuses on the governance of information in a globally network society, on which he published the book Governance and Information Technology: From Electronic Government to Information Government (MIT, 2007, with David Lazer). In his most recent publication, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton, 2009), he looks at the surprising phenomenon of perfect remembering in the digital age, and reveals why we must reintroduce our capacity to forget.

Andrew Payne (UK) is Head of Education & Outreach at The National Archives in the U.K. – the official archive of the British government which holds over 11 million catalogued items covering 1000 years of British and global history. As an E-Learning specialist he has been involved in the Unlocking Archives project, a unique collaboration between SEGfL (South East Grid for Learning), The National Archives, BFI (British Film Institute) and English Heritage. He is a passionate advocate for the power of cultural collections to inspire teachers and learners but believes that organisations need to actively mediate their collections to ensure their effective use.

Richard Rinehart (US) is Digital Media Director & Adjunct Curator at the University of California Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive and Associate Director for Public Programs of the Berkeley Center for New Media. He is active as a new media artist and has curated several exhibitions on digital art and culture. For some years now he has been involved in the development of new models and tools for the documentation, preservation and recreation of digital and media art. On this area of research interest he is currently working, together with Jon Ippolito, on a book which is tentatively entitled New Media & Social Memory: A Murder-Mystery Into the Death of Digital Culture.