Paris programme
Saturday 4 November 2023

“For Rainer, drama and style aren’t innocent, and the very concept of a story, and the way it’s told, is political”—Richard Brody. One of Rainer’s most narratively complex films, Privilege shifts from a documentary about women going through the process of menopause to a deadpan and delightfully anarchic autobiographical meta-film exploring the power dynamics underpinning experience, memory, and the manner in which women’s stories are told. Synopsis courtesy of The Metrograph.

When Yvonne Rainer made her first feature-length film in 1972, she had already influenced the world of dance and choreography for nearly a decade. From the beginning of her film career she inspired audiences to think about what they saw, interweaving the real and fictional, the personal and political, the concrete and abstract in imaginative, unpredictable ways. Her bold feminist sensibility and often controversial subject matter, leavened with a quirky humor, has made her, as the Village Voice dubbed her in 1986, "The most influential American avant-garde filmmaker of the past dozen years, with an impact as evident in London or Berlin as in New York. Rainer was born in San Francisco in 1934. She trained as a modern dancer in New York from 1957 and began to choreograph her own work in 1960. She was one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theater in 1962, the beginning of a movement that proved to be a vital force in modern dance in the following decades. Between 1962 and 1975 she presented her choreography throughout the United States and Europe, notably on Broadway in 1969, in Scandinavia, London, Germany, and Italy between 1964 and 1972, and at the Festival D'Automne in Paris in 1972. In 1968 she began to integrate short films into her live performances, and by 1975 she had made a complete transition to filmmaking. In 1972 she completed a first feature-length film, LIVES OF PERFORMERS. In all she has completed seven features: FILM ABOUT A WOMAN WHO... (1974), KRISTINA TALKING PICTURES (1976), JOURNEYS FROM BERLIN/1971 (1980, co-produced by the British Film Institute and winner of the Special Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Film Critics' Association), THE MAN WHO ENVIED WOMEN (1985), PRIVILEGE (1990, winner of the Filmmakers' Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival, Park City. Utah, 1991, and the Geyer Werke Prize at the International Documentary Film Festival in Munich, 1991), and MURDER and murder (1996). Rainer's films have been shown extensively in the U.S. and throughout the world, in alternative film exhibition showcases and revival houses (such as the Bleecker St Cinema, Roxy-S.F., NuArt-L.A, Film Forum-NYC, et al), in museums and in universities. Her films have also been screened at festivals in Los Angeles (Filmex), London, Montreux, Toronto, Edinburgh, Mannheim, Berlin, Locarno, Rotterdam, Creteil, Deauville, Toulon, Montreal, Hamburg, Salsa Majori, Figueira da Foz, Munich, Vienna, Athens (Ohio), Sundance, Hong Kong, Yamagata, and Sydney. A half-hour video tape entitled YVONNE RAINER: STORY OF A FILMMAKER WHO... was aired on Film and Video Review, WNET-TV in 1980. THE MAN WHO ENVIED WOMEN was aired on Independent Focus, WNET-TV in, 1989, and PRIVILEGE on the same program in 1992 and during the summer of 1994. In the Spring of 1997—to coincide with the release of MURDER and murder—complete retrospectives of the films of Yvonne Rainer were mounted at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco and at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York City. In 2006 MIT Press published Yvonne Rainer's memoir Feelings Are Facts: A Life

Rainer’s last feature is also one of her most personal, inspired by the lows and highs of a breast cancer diagnosis in the early 1990s, and the surprise of a burgeoning lesbian relationship. The latter is playfully refracted here through the love story of two women from very different backgrounds: Yvonne’s sixty-something screen counterpart Doris (Joanna Merlin) who gleefully announces that she “loves eating pussy,” and the younger academic she’s soon to move in with, Mildred (Kathleen Chalfant). A comic romance whose emotions are amplified by Rainer’s structural tomfoolery and signature intellectual rigor—with the director providing running commentary and appearing intermittently to address the camera—MURDER and murder probes the pleasures, and attendant questions, of late-in-life love affairs. (Synopsis courtesy of The Metrograph.)

When Yvonne Rainer made her first feature-length film in 1972, she had already influenced the world of dance and choreography for nearly a decade. From the beginning of her film career she inspired audiences to think about what they saw, interweaving the real and fictional, the personal and political, the concrete and abstract in imaginative, unpredictable ways. Her bold feminist sensibility and often controversial subject matter, leavened with a quirky humor, has made her, as the Village Voice dubbed her in 1986, "The most influential American avant-garde filmmaker of the past dozen years, with an impact as evident in London or Berlin as in New York. Rainer was born in San Francisco in 1934. She trained as a modern dancer in New York from 1957 and began to choreograph her own work in 1960. She was one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theater in 1962, the beginning of a movement that proved to be a vital force in modern dance in the following decades. Between 1962 and 1975 she presented her choreography throughout the United States and Europe, notably on Broadway in 1969, in Scandinavia, London, Germany, and Italy between 1964 and 1972, and at the Festival D'Automne in Paris in 1972. In 1968 she began to integrate short films into her live performances, and by 1975 she had made a complete transition to filmmaking. In 1972 she completed a first feature-length film, LIVES OF PERFORMERS. In all she has completed seven features: FILM ABOUT A WOMAN WHO... (1974), KRISTINA TALKING PICTURES (1976), JOURNEYS FROM BERLIN/1971 (1980, co-produced by the British Film Institute and winner of the Special Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Film Critics' Association), THE MAN WHO ENVIED WOMEN (1985), PRIVILEGE (1990, winner of the Filmmakers' Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival, Park City. Utah, 1991, and the Geyer Werke Prize at the International Documentary Film Festival in Munich, 1991), and MURDER and murder (1996). Rainer's films have been shown extensively in the U.S. and throughout the world, in alternative film exhibition showcases and revival houses (such as the Bleecker St Cinema, Roxy-S.F., NuArt-L.A, Film Forum-NYC, et al), in museums and in universities. Her films have also been screened at festivals in Los Angeles (Filmex), London, Montreux, Toronto, Edinburgh, Mannheim, Berlin, Locarno, Rotterdam, Creteil, Deauville, Toulon, Montreal, Hamburg, Salsa Majori, Figueira da Foz, Munich, Vienna, Athens (Ohio), Sundance, Hong Kong, Yamagata, and Sydney. A half-hour video tape entitled YVONNE RAINER: STORY OF A FILMMAKER WHO... was aired on Film and Video Review, WNET-TV in 1980. THE MAN WHO ENVIED WOMEN was aired on Independent Focus, WNET-TV in, 1989, and PRIVILEGE on the same program in 1992 and during the summer of 1994. In the Spring of 1997—to coincide with the release of MURDER and murder—complete retrospectives of the films of Yvonne Rainer were mounted at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco and at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York City. In 2006 MIT Press published Yvonne Rainer's memoir Feelings Are Facts: A Life.

The film Thirst is a post-human choreography of machines and displaced plants. Millions of tons of Estonian peat end up in greenhouses in the Netherlands, where it is used as a soil substrate for tropical Phalaenopsis orchids. Meanwhile, local communities in Estonia are left with dry wells and a lack of drinking water as their fragile wetlands are drained for peat extraction. The orchids from the Netherlands then find their way back to supermarkets and homes in Estonia. It is a thirst for luxury and abundance that keeps the capitalist machinery running. Thirst is one episode from Kristina Norman’s Orchidelirium film trilogy. Commissioned for the Estonian Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Author and director: Kristina Norman Cinematographer: Erik Norkroos Composer: Märt-Matis Lill Choreographer and cast: Mari Mägi Produced by Rühm Pluss Null in collaboration with CCA Estonia

Kristina Norman (b.1979, lives and works in Tallinn) is an artist whose interdisciplinary work includes video installations, sculpture, and projects in the city space, as well as documentaries and performance. She is interested in the issues of collective memory, the memorial uses of the public space, but also the subtle sphere of the body politic that transgresses the boundaries between the public and the private. In 2009 she represented Estonia at the 53rd International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, with a solo project; a multilayered mixed media installation entitled After-War. The project was a study of a conflict around the relocation of a Soviet monument in Tallinn. In 2022 at the 59th edition, the artist again represented Estonia with an ecocritical exhibition “Orchidelirium. An Appetite For Abundance”, a duo show with Bita Razavi, curated by Corina Apostol. Norman’s experimental film trilogy commissioned for the Estonian Pavilion, offers multiple ways to reflect on the legacies of colonialism from a specifically Eastern European perspective.

A python slithers and curls over the abandoned control room of Chernobyl’s sister, the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant, its radioactive core an unleashed monster that will slither through time for a million years. From Etruscan ruins and sunken cities to the most modern of underground repositories, director Emilija Škarnulyt? follows our attempts to bury the immortal. Addressing the epochal effects of nuclear technology on all levels, Burial follows the cycle of power, an eternal return, another serpent eating its tail.

Emilija Škarnulyt? (b. Vilnius, Lithuania 1987) is an artist and filmmaker. Working between documentary and the imaginary, Škarnulyt? makes films and immersive installations exploring deep time and invisible structures, from the cosmic and geologic to the ecological and political. Winner of the 2019 Future Generation Art Prize, Škarnulyt? represented Lithuania at the XXII Triennale di Milano. Recent solo exhibitions include Tate Modern (2021), Kunsthaus Pasquart (2021), and the National Gallery in Vilnius (2021). Her films are in the IFA, Kadist Foundation and Centre Pompidou collections and have been screened at the Serpentine Gallery, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and numerous film festivals. She is a founder and co-director of Polar Film Lab, and a member of artist duo New Mineral Collective.

As my grandfather's presence in the country becomes increasingly problematic, my mother gradually decides to never touch a camera again, my father becomes obsessively convinced of his own disappearance, and something almost miraculous happens in 1976 in Montreux: Nina Simone comes back from retirement. In Three Disappearances and a Song, I revisit the family archive, pick up my camera, and film 3 people struggling to find new ways to be: my mother, my father, and myself.

Nadia Ghanem is a filmmaker who lives and works in Cairo. She recently finished her first short film as a director Three Disappearances And A Song (2021) which premiered at the 43rd edition of the Cairo International Film Festival, Images Festival, Cinema Árabe Feminino in Brazil and received the best short film award at Gabes Cinema Fen (Tunisia) as well as the audience and Jury awards for best short film at Manassat Film Festival in Cairo. Nadia is currently working on her first feature Looking for Spiderman which received development awards from A Kiss in the Desert, Rawiyat film collective, Two Stories Production, Dox Box and is part of the Studio Seen program. In parallel to being a filmmaker, Nadia Ghanem curated film programs for the 24th edition of the Videoex festival in Basel and since 2022 is a programmer for the Panorama of the European Film organized by Zawya Arthouse Cinema in Cairo. She also works as a Program Manager at Medrar for Contemporary Art where she coordinated the 10th edition of the Cairo Video Festival.

"Beatings Of The Devil" is based on the concept and weather event called sunshowers, or, as my grandmother would often say when it rained while the sun was shining, “The devil is beating his wife”. This wildly inappropriate, and outdated colloquial phrase, which resonated deeply within me as a child, provides a point of departure and interpretation for this work. Created through a series of shoots spanning over four years, the piece has evolved into a memorial to my mother, and a reckoning for my father, who recently lost his wife of 51 years. The piece premiered at the 2022 Art of Brooklyn Film Festival, and won the Vanguard Award for Best Experimental Short.

Bradly Dever Treadaway is a Brooklyn based artist, educator and curator utilizing lens-based image making, moving images, sound, sculpture, installation and performance to comment on the breakdown of intergenerational communication and broken familial links due to natural disaster, technological evolution, mental health challenges, societal shifts and the continuance of interpersonal detachment occurring within American communities. His work is visualized through archival interventions, recontextualizing the archive to serve as form, medium, subject matter and concept, elevating domestic ephemera and rituals while questioning material significance within the photographic medium. Treadaway creates memorials, monuments and mnemonic devices to illustrate ancestral collisions with contemporary responses. His work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of Art, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, The International Center of Photography,The Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, Agora Gallery in Chelsea, NY, The Mobile Museum of Art, The Ospedale degli Innocenti in Florence, Italy, and the Lishui Museum of Photography in China. His film/video work has been screened at the New Orleans Film Festival, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the National Centre for Contemporary Art in Moscow, Russia, Union Docs, Anthology Film Archives, the Art of Brooklyn Film Festival, the Nashville Film Festival, the Coney Island Film Festival, and at the Brooklyn Arts Council’s Scene: Brooklyn. Treadaway’s work has been curated by Vince Aletti, Kevin Jerome Everson, Jon Feinstein and Julian Cox and is part of the permanent collections at The Center for Photography at Woodstock, The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, The Masur Museum of Art, the Ewing Gallery at the University of Tennessee, the Brooklyn Public Library and the Mobile Museum of Art. Treadaway has recently held residencies at Trestle Art Space and BRIC Media Arts in Brooklyn, Kutztown University in Pennsylvania and the Contemporary Arts Center at Woodside in NY.

Emerging from a regular and spontaneous practice of film, A Árvore is an encounter with and an homage to the filmmaker’s father Guilherme Vaz (1948-2018). Major Brazilian artist, composer, experimental musician and maestro, as well as one of the pioneers of conceptual and sound art in Brazil, his compositions often traverse the filmography of Ana Vaz in a constant dialogue between music, sound and place. Guilherme Vaz’s work is marked by his experience living at the recently inaugurated Brasília, where Ana was born, as well as the many years spent collaborating with remote indigenous communities in the Brazilian Amazon. A Árvore is a ghostly ritual woven through the fragments of a recorded conversation between father and daughter transposed to various significant geographies in life lines of both.

Ana Vaz (1986, Brazil) is an artist and filmmaker who works with cinema as an instrument. Her films, or rather her film-poems, travel through territories and events haunted by the perennial consequences of internal and external forms of colonialism, and their footprints on the earth as well as on human and different from human forms. Her practice can also take the shape of writing, critical pedagogy, installations, film programs or ephemeral events, which are expansions or developments of her films. Her works have been presented at film festivals, seminars and institutions such as Locarno Film Festival – Cineasti del presente; Berlinale Forum Expanded; IFFR, Rotterdam; Viennale; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Pivô, São Paulo; Jeu de Paume, Paris; CPH:Dox; New York Film Festival – Projections; TIFF Wavelengths, Toronto; BFI, London; Cinéma du Réel, Paris; Tate Modern, London; LUX Moving Images, London; Tabakalera, San Sebastián; Whitechapel Gallery, London; MAM Museum of Modern Art, São Paulo; Matadero, Madrid; Jameel Arts Center, Dubai; Mostra de Cinema de São Paulo; Savvy Contemporary, Berlin; among others. She is a recipient of the Sundance Film Institute Nonfiction Grant (2019), the Film Society of Lincoln Center Kazuko Trust Award (2015), as well as grand prizes at Festival dei Popoli (2022), Entrevues Belfort (2022), FIDOCS (2022), Punto de Vista (2020), 25FPS (2020), Cinéma du Réel (2016), Media City Film Festival (2015), Fronteira Experimental and Documentary Film Festival (2015). Ana Vaz is also a founding member of the COYOTE collective, an interdisciplinary group working between ecology and political science through conceptual and experimental formats.

Ghosts is a short documentary film, in which ghosts, both real and imagined, haunt the lives of a rural community, in their small town in post-apartheid South Africa.

Teboho Edkins (*1980 in Tennessee, USA) grew up in Southern Africa and lives and works in Cape Town and Berlin. He studied photography and fine art at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, South Africa and film at Le Fresnoy Studio National des Arts Contemporains in Tourcoing, France. This was followed by a degree in directing at the Deutsche Film und Fernseh-akademie in Berlin (dffb). Teboho Edkins’s films have shown at many festivals, group and solo exhibitions, including at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; South London Gallery; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; Weserburg-Museum für Moderne Kunst, Bremen; Museum of Modern Art, New York City. Some of the over 500 film festivals his films have screened at include the International Film Festival Berlin (Berlinale); International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen; and International Film Festival (IFFR), Rotterdam. His films have also been acquired by several public and private art collections including the Goetz Collection in Munich, von Kelternborn Collection in Frankfurt and the Collection KAI 10 | Arthena Foundation in Düsseldorf.

In his famous text titled "On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain", Palestinian writer Edward Saïd explores how the late style of certain composers, writers and artists constitutes a space of creative freedom unmoored from the conventions of their epoch that opens onto new horizons of artistic expression. Inspired by these thoughts, “Late Gestures” is a journey through scenes taken from the later, often neglected films of a number of great filmmakers that in their prophetic untimeliness look towards new possibilities for cinema and the moving image. Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson invite us to explore the hauntology of images through a shape-shifting montage of these “late cinematographic gestures”.

Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson are filmmakers and artists whose works explore the porous borders between fiction and documentary, the visible and the invisible, cinema and installation, theory and practice. Their production includes the creation of films (both features and shorts), mixed-media installations, sound works, performances, radio shows, vernacular technologies and books. The artists often make use of cinema to reactivate lost, forgotten, silenced or neglected archives and histories and to create new modes of collective vision and engagement with contemporary thought and politics. In constant dialogue with literature, philosophy, music, science and the history of cinema their projects are research-based, process-oriented and trans-disciplinary. Their work has been presented at film festivals, in museums and independent art spaces worldwide.