58 In between

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The Intuition of the Body, Time and the Sixth Sense; from Chantal Akerman to Contemporary Women Directors. Muriel Andrin

Whenever Chantal Akerman’s films are mentioned, the question of time rapidly comes up. Raising questions amongst everyone, she imposes her presence in short and medium length films (Saute ma ville, L’enfant aimé ou je joue à être une femme mariée, La chambre, Le 15/08), shot between 1968 and 1972. Far from being isolated, she fits into a whole, a film representation that is closely linked to both language and the body, but to the desire to destroy, at the same time, female stereotypes and the traditional performance rules of the cinema. Curiously, this “all for the art of film” did not depend on the film-maker’s own state of mind or on those years when she was working, and has been passed down to contemporary women directors: Marion Hansel, Jane Campion, Claire Denis, Marina De Van, Lucie Hadzihalilovic, Julie Taymor, Isabel Coixet, Mira Nair or even Naomi Kawase who, thus, have revisited this film configuration of the world of characters and of the utterance of narrative. Yet beyond this, these directors have introduced these reflections in the field of classical narrative or even commercial films, setting them apart from their original experimental value.

File:
Muriel Andrin_eng.pdf — PDF document, 151Kb

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Numax, our university: Conversation with Joaquim Jordà. Marina Garcés

In 1979, Joaquim Jordà filmed a documentary about the experiment in self-management that the workers at the Numax electrical appliance factory carried out in response to the attempt by its owners to close it down in an irregular manner. The documentary was made with the express wish of the Workers’ Committee at Numax which, when the filming was almost completed, decided to invest the last 600,000 pesetas from the strike fund in recording the process that they had all been involved in.

Now, Joaquim Jordà has filmed Veinte años no es nada (Twenty years is nothing), a documentary that aims to reconstruct the history of the last twenty-five years of Spain by taking the lives of the people involved in this experiment in self-management at the Numax factory as a starting point.

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Marina Garces_eng.pdf — PDF document, 97Kb

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Trinh T. Minh-ha, on the moving frontier. Susana Blas

“Why do we continue to be oppressed and continue to oppress others? It’s all much more complex than that positioning of the sources of power you get in a certain type of political cinema. The political can be seen from many different angles; it is not enough just to centre on a political theme and then reproduce the entire ideological language of the mainstream and its oppressive mechanisms. All aspects of the film need to be political, even the formal and structural ones, not just the contents”.

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Blas_eng.pdf — PDF document, 124Kb

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Jørgen Leth, filmmaker. Olatz González Abrisketa, Iñaki Imaz, Asier mendizabal

“Film is a series of images put together. Not a sequence, not a story, but a series of images, nothing more. The order of the images is less important than the single image. The final consequence of that assertion is that the images may be put together blindfolded. That their order may be determined by means of rules that make allowance for a strong element of chance. Like William Burroughs, I consider chance a great inspiration. I allow chance some leeway in my films, during shootings, but often during editing, too. In various ways, I invite chance to join in the game”.

–Jørgen Leth
This is my Working-Credo, which still holds

File:
Gonzalez_eng.pdf — PDF document, 127Kb

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Audio-visual? Carmen Pardo

Lettrism was an artistic movement founded in 1945 in Paris by the Rumanian poet Isidore Isou. The latter and his main follower, Maurice Lemaître, with the incidental complicity of Gil J. Wolman, Guy Debord, François Dufrêne, Marc’O and others laid the foundations for lettrist cinema in the early 1950s: the discrepancy between sound and image; the deconstructive engraving of arbitrary images (films that they had come across, laboratory rejects, etc.); syncinema or screenings conceived as events like happenings; infinitesimal cinema (that emphasises the imaginary world and wipes out the usual elements in what we normally understand by cinema); poly-automatism or the unpredictable laws of chance…* To mark the season held in the MACBA, “Lettrist cinema, between discrepancy and rebellion,” the author analyses the relationship between looking and listening in cinema.

File:
Pardo_es.pdf — PDF document, 95Kb

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My work environment as a musician. Ferran Fages

Environment can mean a lot of things. You can reflect on this from a geographical, historical, professional, artistic, emotional, political, social viewpoint... If I consider the word “environment” in my work as a musician, I mainly want to talk about the environment I face each day.

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Ferran_eng.pdf — PDF document, 85Kb

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Despotism of frontiers. Dimitris Kariofilis

The unnecessary tyranny of settlements, the needless weight of identity, the unwished despotism of frontiers.

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Kariofilis_eng.pdf — PDF document, 79Kb

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Araki: Self, Life, Death. Itziar Bilbao

Barbican Centre, London
Del 6 de octubre al 22 de enero de 2006

Llego al Barbican y lo encuentro lleno de visitantes variopintos: estudiantes japoneses; estudiantes de arte vestidos con sus mejores despojos de Brick Lane; hombres maduros que pasean morosamente ante los retratos de chicas amarradas, a pesar de que muchos están manchados con brochazos y gotones de pintura fluorescente que apenas dejan ver nada jugoso. Araki, al contrario que muchos artistas, no se sonroja nunca. Sus detractores son en general aquellos a los que hace sonrojarse: el exhibicionismo, la banalidad, la sentimentalidad, la enfermiza compulsividad de Araki. Si hay una lección que todo artista debe aprender de él, es ésta: nunca pienses dos veces en la legitimidad de una idea o una imagen. No te cortes, hazla. La exposición en el Barbican Centre es el trabajo de tres comisarias buceando en los archivos interminables de Araki, porque él está ya, seguramente, a diez mil imágenes por delante de ellas. Cada foto es un pequeño evento que afirma su presencia en la tierra.

File:
Araki_eng.pdf — PDF document, 73Kb