FRIDAY, APRIL 24th

[SCREENING]
> Salon de actos Sabatini


ANALYTICAL

Lawrence WEINER : Turning Some Pages
Animation | dv | color | 00:05:00
USA | 2007 [•]

Corinna SCHNITT : About a world / Von einer Welt
Experimental fiction | dv | color | 00:09:34
Germany/Germany, USA | 2008 [•]

Francis NARANJO : …. agosto 2007….
Video | dv | color | 00:18:00
Spain | 2008 [•]

Agustin PARRA : Autoretrato
Video | dv | color and b&w | 00:01:00
Colombia | 2008 [•]

Laetitia BENAT : Fragmentarium
Experimental fiction | dv | color | 00:18:22
France | 2008 [•]

Niklas GOLDBACH : Dawn
Video | dv, hdv | color | 00:01:12
Germany | 2008 [•]

Christian MERLHIOT : Rice bowl hill incident
Fiction | dv | color | 00:40:00
France | 2008 [•]

About analytical or poetic language and what it can bring or subtract to images. Lawrence Weiner uses gestures related to the act of reading, abstract assembling of graphic forms and images of dices. Corinna Schnitt presents an idyllic Alpine landscape, where a dozen nude women are lying in high grass. The women seem to have become part of nature, as if “from another world”. Excerpts from Habernas appear on screen and we are facing a lack of communication. Francis Naranjo directs the encounter of visual, sound and textual information, a net in which the look, the hearing and the subconscious reflect on each other. Augustin Parra presents a self-portrait in and by gestures, the impossible attempt to auto-catch a hand. Laetitia Benat uses the text written by a psychiatrist nurse and has her play her role. Architecture constrain bodies and the stare keeps under surveillance Niklas Goldbach films 60 people lying in the unrenovated basement floor at Palais de Tokyo, a disco bal lis slowly rotating above them. Christian Merlhiot films a Japanese teacher, who tells an inexplicable event that happened to her class during an outing in the mountains. The story is taken from a report mentioned by Haruki Murakami in its novel “Kafka on the shore”.

FRIDAY, APRIL 24th

[SCREENING]
> Room 2


PROPAGANDA ARCHITECTURE

Romana SCHMALISCH : Weg zum Klub. Erholung durch Kultur
Exp. documentary | 16mm, dv, super 8 | color | 00:11:00
Germany | 2007 [•]

Christian BARANI, Guillaume REYNARD : Kazakhstan, naissance dune nation
Exp. documentary | dv | color | 01:04:00
France/Kazakhstan | 2008 [•]

The architecture of power, as a fiction in reality. Romana Schmalisch combines in the form of a collage Soviet avant-garde buildings from the 1920s, with film and audio recordings from the late 1930s, in which the subject of changes in the city of Moscow plays a central role. Christian Barani and Guillaume Reynard have filmed Astana, the new capital of Kazakhstan, following the will of President Nazarbaiev. They try to explore how fiction preceded reality, as for instance during Darejan Omirbaev’s shooting of a film. They also delve into the flipside of things: from a construction site building to a small house about to be expropriated. Through an ex-soviet booming oligarchy, they paint a melancholic and poetic portait of globalization. In 1998, seven years after the country’s independence, the autocratic Kazakh president Noursoultan Nazarbaiev decides to change the capital city from Almaty to Astana, located in the northern steppes. High-rise buildings emerge, financed by oil exports. The film starts with a presidential speech delivered in 1997 about Kazakhstan future, praising “the three social layers, the well off, the middle-class and the poor”, the infinite promises of a liberal economy. Christian Barani and Guillaume Reynard witness the development a new society, in the ruins of affluent wealth.

FRIDAY, APRIL 24th

[SCREENING]
> Salon de actos Sabatini


CARTE BLANCHE
TO PEDRO COSTA

Pedro COSTA : Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub, cinéastes
Documentary | color | 01:05:00
Portugal / France | 2001

Pedro Costa filmed Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet at Fresnoy during the editing of the third version of Sicilia. His film alternates between extracts of the film and images of the film-makers at work. Submerging himself in the shadow of the editing room, Costa listens to them speaking and watches them at work. Here we find a cinema handbook according to the Staub, containing editing and acting theories and practices.

After studying editing and directing at the Film School of the Lisbon National Academy, Pedro Costa worked as an assistant director and then launched himself into directing his first short film, Cartas a Julia, en 1987. He then does a children's series for Portuguese television. His first feature film, Le Sang, caught the critics' attention in 1989, but went un-noticed by the public due to bad commercial distribution, as happened with the second, Down to Earth (1994), which did, however, establish his style and talent. In 1997 Ossos deals with the theme of unhappy childhood in a sober way, for which he is rewarded in Venice and Belfort. After this comes In Vanda's Room, a documentary which follows a drug addict's descent into hell. This is followed by Où gît votre sourire enfoui ? in which - as in the film presented below - he pays tribute to Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub.

FRIDAY, APRIL 24th

[SCREENING]
> Room 2


REVISED CINEMA

Dave GRIFFITHS : The Legend of Pwdre Sêr
Experimental video | dv | color and b&w | 00:01:30
United Kingdom | 2008 [•]

Volker SCHREINER : Scope
Experimental video | betaSP | color and b&w | 00:04:57
Germany | 2008 [•]

Eli CORTIÑAS HIDALGO : Dial M for Mother
Experimental video | dv | color | 00:11:30
Spain/Germany | 2008 [•]

Christoph GIRARDET : Storyboard
Experimental video | betaSP | color | 00:05:08
Germany | 2007 [•]

Paulette PHILLIPS : Marnies handbag
Experimental video | dv | color and b&w | 00:10:00
Canada | 2008 [•]

Noe SENDAS : The indifferent
Experimental video | dv | color and b&w | 00:12:34
Portugal | 2008 [•]

Les LEVEQUE : Stammering forward backward GIANT
Experimental video | dv | color | 00:17:00
USA | 2008 [•]

Film footage and cinematographic quotes are reinterpreted and reorganized; allowing for a reflection around cinema and a space for plastic artists whose iconoclast work is often in-between. Before the story unfolds, the arranging and assembling of scenes have an ambivalent and underlying meaning. Dave Griffiths intertwines Irishmen, the Nasa and football champions, with superior intelligence coming from outer space. Volker Schreiner uses the loud speaker, as to reveal the disturbing part of communication and speeches. Eli Cortiñas Hidalgo uses the figure of Gena Rowlands, chased by the persecuting ringing of a phone, a voice is heard talking to her as someone who seems to be a mother, a dialogue with oneself. Christoph Girardet shows how memory would look like was it made of cinematographic fragments. Paulette Phillips focuses on the sign language and on signs translated through cinema when a female character about to commit a crime. Noe Sendas builds an internal monologue, which underlines the distance between a feeling and what triggered it. Les Leveque rearranges the film Giant, the epic story of Texas, oil and racism.