Curated Programs – Page 31 – Diagonal Thoughts

Figures of Dissent : Masao Adachi

Figures of Dissent : Masao Adachi
23 November 2011 20:30, KASKcinema, Gent. A Courtisane programme.

“Shooting a gun or shooting with a camera, it doesn’t make a difference to me”
— Masao Adachi

“The revolution has been continuously my theme. Main subject” says Masao Adachi (born 1939). “People Said: Revolutionary Cinema. I said: No. It’s Cinema for Revolution.” Of all the filmmakers that would be inspired by the spirit of resistance and utopia of the 1960’s and 1970’s, Adachi is without a doubt the most radically and perseveringly militant. Armed with a camera or with a gun: it made no difference to him. To him, both weapons served as possible intervention tools in the fight against political and social oppression. It is not accidental that his first films were made under the auspices of the Japanese student movements that were born after WWII against what were regarded as antidemocratic and neo-colonial policies (particularly in relation to the USA). With his surrealistically tinted and politically provoking experiments he inscribed himself rapidly as part of the so called “new wave” currents that shook Japanese culture of the time. In that context he collaborated with the likes of Nagisa Oshima and especially Kôji Wakamatsu, with whom he would inject the erotically charged “pink cinema” genre with a lively dose of anarchism. Resulting in controversial works such as Seiyûgi (Sex Game, 1968) and Jogakusei gerira (Female Student Guerillas, 1969), these experiences taught Adachi the basic rules of guerrilla-style filmmaking: fast and cheap. In 1971, after visiting the Cannes Film Festival, Wakamatsu and Adachi travelled to Lebanon, where they would film Sekigun-PFLP: Sekai Senso Sengen (The Red Army / PFLP: Declaration of World War), a propaganda film in support of the Arab fight against Israeli occupation. In 1974 Adachi returned to Pastine, with the idea of making a second film. He would end up staying 26 years, at the service of the Palestinian cause. In 1997, under the pressure of the Japanese authorities, he was incarcerated in Beirut. He was extradited to his country three years later, where he remained in prison for two more years. Once free, Adachi gave the account of his experiences in a series of autobiographical publications as well as a new film – his first in more than thirty years : Yûheisha – Terorisuto (Prisoner/Terrorist, 2006). Today Adachi’s activist thought resonates with more force than ever, as show the number of screenings and retrospectives that have been organised around the world in recent years. Perhaps the most beautiful homage is the one that French filmmaker Philippe Grandrieux pays to his work in a recent cinematographic portrait.

Philippe Grandrieux
Il se peut que la beauté ait renforcé notre résolution – Masao Adachi
(It May be that Beauty has Strengthened our Resolve)
FR, 2011, video, color, stereo, Japanese and French spoken with English subtitles, 75′

“A to and fro between politics and cinema, between Trotskym and Surrealism, between armed struggle and screenplays, between Palestine, Lebanon and Japan, between the day-before-yesterday and today, between beauty and resolve, between the art of eating and that of being a father, such is the risky and precise life of Masao Adachi, the monsieur with the white hair glimpsed in his delusions. And this is just how Philippe Grandrieux, faithful to his way of doing things, decided to suggest his portrait, with no a priori, without interrupting speech, filming him and listening to his words without at first understanding them, framing him in a tight close-up that is sometimes underexposed, other times overexposed, to better abandon him later for: cherry trees in blossom, the streets of Tokyo swarming with cars and passersby, familiar objects and lactescent celling light. And from time to time, Grandrieux lets speak a few shots from his earlier films, from where suddenly crops up the phrase, Genet-like, given in the title: a paradoxical program that hesitates to connect one shore to the other”. (Jean-Pierre Rehm) This is the first part of the film series “Il se peut que la beauté ait renforcé notre résolution”, dedicated to filmmakers who in the course of the 20th century devoted their lives and work to resistance and emancipation.

Masao Adachi & Koji Wakamatsu
Sekigun-PFLP: Sekai Senso Sengen (The Red Army / PFLP: Declaration of World War)
JP/ Palestine, 1971, 16mm, color, stereo, Japanese and Arabic spoken with English subtitles, 69’

“In 1971, Adachi and Wakamatsu were invited to Cannes Film Festival. On the way back they went to Beirut, and while they were there shot Sekigun PFLP – Sekai Senso Sengen (The Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War) a film that showed the ‘everyday life’ of Arab guerillas, and transformed a ‘news documentary’ into a radical text for a world revolution. Rejecting the existing system of film exhibition and declaring the screening itself as a political act, the ‘Red Bus’ mobile projection unit was formed and they hit the road, showing the film in Palestine and Europe. This film can be seen as the key Japanese film of that era, as it completely epitomised the spirit of the radical filmmaking movement. It was also a personal turning point for one of its makers: Adachi left Japan in 1974, in order to join the Palestinian revolution as a Japanese Red Army soldier. “ (Go Hirasawa)

Texts concerning Masao Adachi and PFLP

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

Figures of Speech

9 November 2011, 21:00. Beursschouwburg, Brussels.
A Courtisane event, in the context of the S.H.O.W. (Shit Happens on Wednesdays) series.

What happens when the conventional angle of vision is displaced, the prevailing forms of identification challenged, the certainties of time and place undone? What is awoken is the capability in each of us to become a foreigner in the arrangement of places and paths we generally call “reality”. What opens up is a space where all speech is understood as voice, where every expression counts as an utterance.

With film works by Mati Diop, Pedro Costa, Thomas Ochoa & Andriana Meyer, Neil Beloufa.

“How can one be sure that the human animal mouthing a noise in front of you is actually voicing an utterance rather than merely expressing a state of being? If there is someone you do not wish to recognize as a political being, you begin by not seeing them as the bearers of politicalness, by not understanding what they say, by not hearing that it is an utterance coming out of their mouths.”
– Jacques Rancière

Mati Diop
Atlantiques
SN/FR, video, colour, stereo, Wolof spoken with English subtitles, 2009, 15′

“To start with Moonfleet and Jamaica Inn, we all remember the tales of ships being lured by shipwreckers to break on the rocks. The close-up of the rotating lighthouse lenses, which is the closing shot of Atlantiques, immediately calls this to mind. There is no port behind this lighthouse, only the night and the icy waters of death, the mirage of a Europe where life seems easier but inaccessible, the gaunt shadow of an Eldorado that is not so, even if, like all Western powers it feeds off the exhaustion of the world’s poorer regions. ‘Good bye, I am leaving to die, this is not to be said’, Seligne confides to his friends on the beach. As the survivor of a shipwreck that haunts him, he is nonetheless determined to set out again, as surviving in Senegal has become impossible. The night engulfs everything, the adieu to his friends and the tale of his first crossing. Light is no longer part of his world. It has been left in the village on the women’s tearful faces and the graves.” (Yann Lardeau)

Pedro Costa
O nosso homem
PT, 2010, video, colour, stereo, Portugese spoken with Engish subtitles, 23′

“O Nosso Homem (Notre Homme) est une variation brève dans le droit fil de la trilogie consacrée aux habitants du quartier aujour’hui détruit de Fontainhas; et plus précisement une sorte d’appendice à un troisième volet, En avant Jeunesse! Dont le héros, Ventura, réapparait, devenu ici un des quatre personages de ces dialogues de désespérance. Ils se poursuivent, de décor en décor, du plus sombre au plus éclatant, portés par cette somptuosité de cadres et de tons de lumière et d’ombres qui faisait dire ç Jacques Rancière, à propos d’En avant Jeunesse! “La foi dans l’art qui atteste le grandeur du pauvre – la grandeur de l’homme quelconque – brille ici plus que jamais. Mais non plus celle qui l’assimile à l’affirmation d’un salut.” Une figure court à travers O Nosso Homem pour en exprimer la violence mythique: “ce bonhomme qui emmène les gens dans un vie meilleure”, leur glissant furtivement un papier qu’il leur redemande si fort à l’avis d’expulsion qui frappe en fin de parcours José Albert, un des quatre Cap-Verdiens poursuivant à Lisbonne ces échanges sur ‘improbable dignité de vivre.” (Raymond Bellour)

Tomas Ochoa & Andriana Meyer
Five Dots
AR, 2005, video, colour & b/w, stereo, Castellano spoken with English subtitles, 11′

“Five dots examines the relationship between exercising punishment based on control over the body of the convicted subject and his resistance to power by virtue of his capacity to produce symbols. After a photography workshop in the reformatory for juveniles in Mendoza, Argentina, in which the authors of the present project intervened as mediators, the inmates were given the opportunity to draw a self-referential record based on their own symbolism and imaginary world—songs, phrases picked up in the street, invented by them, dreamed about, altered by remembrance. Finally, they were requested to recite, in front of the camera, excerpts of the “punishment technology” studies conducted by Michel Foucault in his book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.” (Tomas Ochoa & Andriana Meyer). Courtesy the artist and KATZ CONTEMPORARY, Zürich

Neil Beloufa
Kempinski
FR/ML, 2007, video, colour, stereo, French spoken with Engish subtitles, 15′

“Video or films shot in Africa are in most cases paternalist documentaries, or focus on exotic political issues, but rarely actual fiction and even less science-fiction. Kempinski respects the official documentary rules as nothing is scripted. Everything is improvised with a subtle “real” game rule shifting, and it’s the stereotypical sci-fi frames and music that make the piece mutate into a blurry fake fiction. Does faking a fiction, which is naturally fake, make it “real”? Interviewees simply had to talk about the future using the present tense, which undermines our expectations of Africa, while still being ” for real”. The interesting thing about the project, is that even though science fiction’s global culture is known there, most of what they said correlated to a more animistic universe, which surpasses my own understanding. Though I’m no expert on Mali, it seemed to highlight the two distinctive layers of a kind of their reality and society.“ (Neil Beloufa)

XL CINEMA (October – December 2011)

In a time when YouTube videos compete for the longest duration, digital technologies have erased all restrictions in regards to the length of filming and the term “slow cinema” has gradually gained acceptance in film jargon, traditional film exhibitors remain obstinately attached to conventional formats. There is no mercy for film works that exceed the three-hour limit: they are doomed to a straight-to-video career (or rather, straight-to-internet). That is, if they don’t find a place as a series on a generous television channel. And yet film history is full of examples of epic cinematographic works that have dared to take all the time they need. Take Jacques Rivette’s 12-hour-long Out 1 (1971), for a long time considered the most “invisible” (because “unscreenable”) masterpiece of contemporary cinema. Or Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s acclaimed Hitler – ein Film aus Deutschland (1977, 430’), which the late Susan Sontag once described as one of the biggest art works of the 20th century; or yet another example: Patricio Guzmán’s chronicle of the socialist revolution in Chile, La Batalla de Chile (1979, 270’), without a doubt a monument of political cinema. The list is endless; just recently the eXtra Long works of Lav Diaz, Wang Bing and Olivier Assayas have left an indelible impression. Courtisane and KASKcinema have decided to join forces in order to offer a unique opportunity to see these and many other works as they should be seen, on the big screen, in their full length. Every first Wednesday of the month. Bring a snack, we will provide the coffee!

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WED 5 October 2011, 18:00. KASKcinema, Gent

Alexander Sokurov
Spiritual Voices (From the war diaries)
RU, 1995, colour, stereo, 328’

“The border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan , 1994: at the very moment when the Russian campaign in Chechnya was in full swing and was shown every day on state television, Alexander Sokurov joined a border patrol in the newly independent Tajikistan . The war with Afghanistan was officially over, but the Taliban regularly carry out provocative actions against the Russian border post. This marginal war provides the material for a journal, not in the sense of an up-to-date news report, but rather a timeless diary containing the personal impressions of one of Russia ‘s greatest filmmakers. Dream images from a no man’s land far from home”. (Pieter van Bogaert)

“…We began to make our film in summer, then came again in winter. We worked in the places, where war is daily routine, where the state of war is not a sudden attack, but the normal life itself. Namely — fighting operations on the border between Tadjikistan and Afghanistan. Sometimes it were many days of troubled waiting. Sometimes battle: assault or repulse of it. But always there were victims, and always there was parting from the relatives and friends. And always anguish and abandonment. Proceeding from the idea of my home country, which I have formed, Russia is a land permanently waging war, and people here are formed always ready to go to war. Our national heroes are peoples who took part in war — not those who created something unusual, sitting and working peacefully. Russia is hardly HGH imaginable for me without those convulsions of war, without this military trembling.”
— Alexander Sokurov

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WED 2 November 2011, 18:00. KASKcinema, Gent

Olivier Assayas
Carlos (full version)
FR, 2010, colour, stereo, 338’

“The film tracks the rise and fall of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as ‘Carlos the Jackal,’ a terrorist active during the 1970s and 1980s. Venezuelan-born, educated in Moscow, an instrumental figure in a number of militant leftist causes and later a mercenary-for-hire working from behind the Iron Curtain, Carlos, as Edgar Ramírez portrays him, is a dizzying, media-savvy, shape-shifting blur, as much a product of the Cold War politics as one of its most visible agents. (…) While the film ostensibly focuses on the exploits of the enigmatic man at its center, it’s arguably more concerned with the dramatically shifting world around him, and more broadly the reorganization of European leftism after the heady days of May 1968, the disintegration of unified international struggle, and the way that generation, which is also Assayas’s, grappled with the revolution that never came.” (Genevieve Yue)

“I know the general audiences would prefer a shorter cut. The thing is that a five-and-a-half hour film is located within a very specific cinematic space. In terms of style and narration, it allows me to go into areas that are completely new for me. It’s a much more satisfying reflection on cinema and the power of cinema. It shows how you can deal simultaneously with small and big issues – small issues being the fate of one man and big issues being the geopolitics of a period. This kind of scope isn’t really possible in a shorter version.”
— Olivier Assayas

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WED 7 December 2011, 18:00. KASKcinema, Gent

John Gianvito
Vapor Trail (Clark)
US, 2010, colour, stereo, 264’

“Vapor Trail (Clark) examines the tragic legacy of environmental disaster left by the United States at the site of the Clark Air Base in the Philippines. The length of Gianvito’s film (four and a half hours, nearly) enables him to characterise the Clark disaster as a direct consequence, and an inseparable part, of the history of US imperialism – without reducing it to a mere example (since the film explores, very fully, the personal tragedies of the victims and the passion and the dedication of the activists fighting for the clean-up of the Clark site). (…) To explore the disaster at such length and in such detail is to overcome two typical effects of documentaries on the sufferings of the powerless: on the one hand, a wallowing-in-misery syndrome that arouses predictable feelings without leading to any insight; on the other, a quickly dissipated rush of outrage that serves as quick gratification for the politically liberal viewer.” (Chris Fujiwara). Gianvito is currently editing a companion work, Vapor Trail (Subic), which examines the effects of the Subic Naval Base, also located in the Philippines.

“There must be two Americas: one that sets the captive free, and one that takes a once-captive’s new freedom away from him, and picks a quarrel with him with nothing to found it on; then kills him to get his land”.
—Mark Twain

Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia

“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

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.

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WED 28.09.2011, 20:30

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.

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.

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.

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THU 29.09.2011, 20:30

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.