I’ve co-programmed, with Esperanza Collado, the next Experimental Film Club screening happening this Sunday at 4pm in the Ha’penny Bridge Inn in Dublin. You can read my introduction to the programme here.
Archive for the ‘curating’ Category
NOTES FROM THE BERLINALE #2: The Other Berlinales
Tuesday, February 12th, 2008
With a film festival on the scale of the Berlinale, it’s difficult to write as if it was one single festival at all; really, it’s more like a panoply of overlapping film festivals with their own curatorial (and commercial) agendas, and their own audiences. Many festival-goers like myself will endlessly festival-hop from one programme to the other, mixing and matching divergent films and events to the extent that any themes or contrasts an individual programmer may have had in mind tend to get lost in the shuffle, replaced instead by the individual festival-hopper’s own impulsive selections and critical impressions. We get to be our own curators, in other words (an idea that’s been explored in this blog from early on), and as a result there are even more irreconcilable Berlinales than there are distinct programmes.
So far, mine has been eclectic to the point of schizophrenia, crammed to the point of bulimia, rich to the point of obscenity…the superlatives could go on. It’s also founds its highlights in the hidden and lesser-known crevices of this mammoth festival.
After a few days floating down the main stream of the festival (the competition films and the attendant press conferences), I ran to the fringes of the festival, where the most revelatory surprises tend to be found—which, after the anemic predictability of the press community, became somewhat of a primal craving. The Director’s Lounge is about as fringe as you can get—not actually connected with the festival, this cosy cinema-bar-lounge has been presenting a programme of experimental cinema and video art for the duration of the Berlinale. I caught their opening night screenings and a programme of films by experimental filmmakers Thorsten Fleisch and Telemach Wiesinger a few days later.
As well as a set by a live jazz band (who also performed an improvised score to one of the films), the opening night presented a strong group of (mostly) new experimental shorts, ranging from 36 seconds to 17 minutes in length. Some were impressive elaborations of familiar avant-garde traditions (Allan Brown’s handpainted movie about chickens, Uncle Cluck (2007) or André Werner found footage symphony Flash (2008)) while others seemed a little less categorisable (Eytan Heller’s Love Sum Game (2006), where an actual game of tennis played over the Israeli-Palestinian wall). Filmmakers and projectionists Fleisch and Wiesinger presented a double bill of the former’s super 8 work and the latter’s 16mm films, and in one stunning choreographed projection, presented two films simultaenously which then merged and overlapped, the 16mm and 8mm images synergising into a bubbling unity. Apart from the formal strength and diversity of the film’s on show, the lounge-style screening environment was a significant way of recontextualising how we watch experimental cinema, which too often can get ghettoised in sterile museum-like atmospheres (even in some cinemas) that work against the kind of relaxed and even irreverent engagement that these films sometimes call for.
Forum Expanded is the ostensibly more legitimate and official alternative to the Lounge, and thanks to curators such as Stefanie Schulte Strathaus it has consistently been the home of the most daring and exceptional programming in the festival. This year was perhaps a little underwhelming in comparison to 2007, which featured Marc Siegel’s epic Underground/Overseas programme, but still full of various gems. The programme of shorts from the vaults of the Whitney Museum, mostly New American Cinema works from the 60s and 70s, was a real treat, featuring lesser-known films (at least to me) from Jonas Mekas and Paul Sharits, and fascinating films from hitherto undiscovered artists (at least to me) such as Richard Serra and Larry Gottheim. The Jack Smith programme, presented by dedicated preserver and promulgator of Smith’s work Jerry Tartaglia, was, while equally rare a privilege, a little less impressive. Presenting a compilation of raw footage either shot by or featuring performances by Smith, and a previously unseen super 8 film by Smith, Sinbad in Baghdad, this presentation was presumably thrilling for someone familiar with a lot of his work (which last year’s near-complete Smith retrospective at the Forum made possible for more than a few)—but for a complete Smith novice like myself, it was perhaps not the best entry point into the work of a nonetheless clearly unique filmmaker.
The most exceptional new discovery for me in Forum Expanded (and F.E. is all about new discoveries) was Dušan Makavejev’s W.R. Mysteries of the Organism (1971), pictured above. I probably would have skipped this film, which seemed at first glance to be a zany and lightweight Sixties-with-a-capital-S celebration of free love, if not for Vassily Bourikas, a Berlin-based filmmaker and curator whose passionate recommendations should never be taken lightly. After catching Makavejev’s public interview in the Berlinale Talent Campus (and, thanks to Vassily, actually having a coffee with the legendary Yugoslavian), I finally saw the film today. While there is an element of celebratory 60s free love rhetoric in the film, its collagist approach, mixing documentary, fantasy and narration, and its gift for dancing between an engaged passion and a more distanced critical perspective—well, put simply, it’s a lot more multi-faceted than a MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR slogan (speaking of slogans, the one featured in the film, KILL FOR PEACE, is pretty classic…)
Vassily can elaborate a lot better than I can on the importance of making possible the discovery and re-discovery of films like this possible, and the political implications both of their widespread marginalisation and suppression, and the attempt to counter those processes. But suffice to say, it’s what makes a festival (or should we say festival-constellation?) like the Berlinale(s) worth writing about, and almost makes you forgive all the other shit that goes on here.
IL CINEMA É LA VITA, LA VITA É IL CINEMA: the Lucca Film Festival Interview
Saturday, January 26th, 2008
The Lucca Film Festival is an experimental adventure: full of guns, champagne, super-8 cameras, anti-Pisan slogans, ex-girlfriends and ex-Cahiers critics—and that’s just what happened during my interview. As a companion piece to my soon-to-be-published report on the festival, the following is a chat I had with two of the festival’s very young and very smart organisers, Alessandro de Francesco and Luca Perezzi. The conversation took place on the second last day of the festival, but the closing party had already (unofficially) begun…
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Alessandro and I are sitting in a cafe outside the Teatro San Girolamo, where most of the festival is taking place. Many of the other guests sit at a nearby table, drinking and laughing and occasionally filling our glasses.
DONAL: So… I was just going to start by asking…
Someone approaches him.
ALESSANDRO: Ciao.
He talks to the guy in Italian.
ALESSANDRO: Sorry.
DONAL: No problem. OK. So can you start by telling me when the festival started and how it came about?
ALESSANDRO: It started three years ago—this is the third edition. The first one was in 2005. I received a call by Stefan [Giorgi, co-organiser], maybe you know him? With long hair, the tallest one. Very practical man. He called me and told me, “We want to make film festival.” And I laughed. “What do you mean?” Because Nicola [Borelli, official president of the festival]… I think he attended a lecture about organising events related to cinema. So he first had the idea to make a festival, who told it to Stefan, who told it to me. And I laughed. But then we tried to organise the first edition, which was 2005.
DONAL: The first year was based around the Italian film critic, Marco Melani? Can you talk a bit about him and why you chose him as the focus?
ALESSANDRO: This is also to do with Nicola, who had an exam on critic history in Italy and one of the books he had was about Marco Melani. We liked so much his writings but we also liked his way of thinking cinema and living cinema.
He hears people coming towards us.
ALESSANDRO: I think it’s something like what’s happening now…
A bottle of champagne is plopped on the table in front of Alessandro. A hand pours him a glass. Film critic Marie-Anne Guerin, an ex-contributor to Cahiers du Cinema who currently writes for Vertigo and Trafic, points a golden toy gun to his head.
MARIE-ANNE: Shut up. You’re too clever. You’re much too clever.
ALESSANDRO: Please. Please. Please push it. Please.
She does.
ALESSANDRO: Aaagh!
He drinks some champagne.
ALESSANDRO: I mean, yeah … It’s something that’s happened now … I mean … people [Loud cackling from somewhere.] People meeting, you know…
Performance artist Sabrina Paul appears behind Alessandro with a sign reading “PISA MERDA”. Everybody cracks up.
ALESSANDRO: Was I supposed to do something serious? Because I… Because… Maybe it is too late to make something serious. I mean it’s already four o’clock, we’re all drunk… Anyway, Marco Melani was born here in Tuscany and he died in 1966. Of…AIDS. His was toxic. An addict. Anyway, this does not matter, obviously.
DONAL: What was it about his thinking of cinema?
ALESSANDRO: [mishears me] Yeah. And he lived cinema. That’s what really inspired us.
Luca Perezzi approaches us.
LUCA: Who?
ALESSANDRO: Marco Melani.
DONAL: Do you want to join in?
ALESSANDRO: [looking desperate] Yeah, please! Please.
Alessandro talks to Luca in Italian for a second, then looks at me apologetically.
DONAL: You gotta go?
ALESSANDRO: Yeah, just for five minutes, to say goodbye to Alice Debord [wife of Guy Debord], she’s leaving now.
DONAL: OK sure.
ALESSANDRO: See you here in five minutes.
Luca sits down.
LUCA: So where’s Alessandro left it?
DONAL: Ah good, you’re taking over, are you?
LUCA: What Alessandro was saying about Marco Melani: Marco Melani really understood how to live and interpret cinema. Not cinema just as movies. But cinema as situations. Cinema as festivals, of course, but also production in a way—not really common and normal to say production, you know like making…uh…taking friends together, putting and doing stuff, really, you know….creative, creative. And that’s why we decide the first year to… But actually I joined the group later, you know. That was the first…two thousand and….let me see…
DONAL: 2005.
LUCA: 2005. That was about Vietnam time, you know? Long time ago. We were… Like children. They began in January and I joined the group about June. But they couldn’t live without me of course. I joined later but I was, you know…like Philip [Dijon de Montenon, another co-organiser]. But we were really… Not important. I would say fundamental.
DONAL: Did Melani make any films or he was just a critic?
LUCA: He made a couple of short movies, and he was assistant director for a couple of movies as well. One with Benigni. You know Benigni, the one of La Vita è Bella (1997)? Crap. Anyway…. Can I say crap about La Vita è Bella or no?
DONAL: Yeah, sure.
LUCA: Ok. So it’s crap. He did one movie as director with Benigni where Benigni was a typical Tuscan comic, funny, with a lot of bad words, with God… funny, really funny. And he was assistant director for Berlin-Jerusalum (1989, Amos Gitai).
He was strange… he didn’t have a real role in the cinema… he was doing movies, yeah, and then he was a critic. But a very strange kind of critic. He didn’t really write a lot. He wrote in some newspapers but not really and some reviews but always a not a lot. And he wrote a lot of introductions and stuff like this for catalogues of festivals, because his main occupation was doing festivals—or taking drugs. These were the three main occupations—taking drugs, watching movies, organising festivals. Watching movies, of course, during the night…
And we were all really impressed by him. He was really…. He was marvellous for us. Because we have to emphasise that he had inside him the two souls of the festival, and of the organisers of the festival: the one of the underground cinema, of course, and the one of the historic and didactic movies, like Rossellini, or [hesitates]…. some movies of Taviani and movies like this, you know, with the historical situation, like Benvenutti, who is a little director that we’ve shown these last two years, not now. He lives close to here so he’s a friend of ours. And so it’s the two Alessandro, Andrea they’re more involved in the underground cinema, whereas me, I’m less involved with underground maybe, even if I like, and more in this kind of historical cinema, or realistic cinema, political cinema… And he has this two. So for us it was really…perfect for us. That’s all.
DONAL: So when you started the festival did you have…
LUCA: Money? No.
[Festival president Nicola looks for someone to give his microphone to.]
DONAL: But were you all in agreement about what you wanted to do with it? You had the same ideas…?
LUCA: Well when they started, more or less, yes. Because I told you, they started January, I joined them not long after but the main programme of the festival was already done. And I agreed with everything because the first year there was a kind of section with “movies of our life”, like even really famous movies…Polanski movies, Greenaway movies, which were not really close to Melani stuff. There were big movies that we like, famous movies that we liked people to see.
And then there was also Melani films I really loved, like [Spanish filmmaker Adolfo] Arrieta and [Paolo] Benvenuti… And there was Rossellini’s movies. So I agreed and more or less we all agreed. Second year was kind of different because last year was really underground cinema. Maybe too underground. Me, I really liked it, but part of the group, less and less. That’s why this year you see we put two different…
DONAL: You have Michael Snow but also the Taviani brothers.
LUCA: But the Tavianis, of course. Even if I think that the first movies of Taviani were really experimental; then of course they changed. The first part they were so experimental. And anyway, yeah, it’s too different kinds… And I think we are gonna, if we continue and I hope so but when you don’t have money you never know, if we continue, we’d like to continue on these two… how is the track of the rail? Which is the name? You know the railways, which is the name of the two stuff? You know, there are two? It seems like they never meet but they are always together. And in the end they finish in the station so they are in the same way.
Alessandro comes back. Luca explains in Italian what we’ve been talking about.
DONAL: Do you agree with what Luca has been saying?
ALESSANDRO: [a little dazed] …I didn’t get it exactly.
I explain, Luca explains again in Italian.
ALESSANDRO: …That’s the truth, you know?
Luca messes with Alessandro’s super 8 camera.
LUCA: How can I open that stuff, Alessandro?
ALESSANDRO: You can’t use it.
LUCA: No I’m not going to use it, I’m just gonna–
ALESSANDRO: It’s open… It’s always open…
LUCA: I can’t…Oh….hi Donal!
ALESSANDRO: Your eyes are not open.
LUCA: My eyes are not open on the world.
Alessandro wanders away again.
LUCA: Alessandro can you bring something to drink to me? [to me] So let’s carry on with the questions. Alessandro, there are new questions! Come! New question.
DONAL: One more question about setting up the festival: When it started, did you have a clear idea—
LUCA: Oh, who has a clear idea about the life?
DONAL: Did you know you were going to invite all these guests? Did you have many special guests the first year?
LUCA: Yeah, we had some guests. We had [Italian film scholar Adriano] Apra, we had Arrieta. They are always at the festival. And the first year we had this Benvenuti. And we had some friends of Melani, we did a kind of conference with the friends of Melani. … We have one Italian director called [XXX!], who is coming tomorrow too. Actually, he’s not good. He’s really a bad person, but he’s done a couple…two…good movies. But you know the kind of “ehh, I’m the director”. Anyway, he came the first year. Last year we had Kenneth Anger. Who knows why? That was really strange, because he’s not used to coming to Italy. We were really lucky because he was not sick in that period, he was free. But it had been years that he didn’t really move around. And he came to this festival. Why? I don’t know. I don’t know why Michael Snow came. Because we don’t have money, we don’t have any strong power to push us.
DONAL: Where do you get the money to run the festival?
LUCA: Institutions and some private sponsors.
DONAL: And is it…
LUCA: Is it enough? No.
[Pause.]
DONAL: I’m interested in how you all discovered these weird types of cinema. It seems strange that there’s six or seven of you young guys and you all love it. Did you all discover it separately or together?
LUCA: I think there are different stories. I think at the festival, first of all we have to say that we all grow up with the festival. We all start to know stuff with the festival. Of course, none of us saw all the movies of Michael Snow before the festival. We knew a bit… And it came little by little, reading books and stuff… Me personally, I started to go to festivals and I started really young watching strange movies…but then I quit a little bit and I prefer other kind of cinema. But then with the festival, little by little… Of course Marco Melani was important for us, because we started to see what he liked. So little by little we…improve our interest in this kind of cinema. But I mean, Alessandro, Nicola and Phillip are the group that like experimental cinema the most, and Andrea [Monti, ANOTHER co-organiser] too, in part. They start growing little by little. Me, too, I like to watch, I like to keep up with experimental cinema, also to understand other parts of the cinema. We are talking with Tito, you know Tito? The short guy who’s just left now. He was talking about guys who like to watch only experimental movies. Nobody of us watch only experimental movies. We like to see experimental cinema also as a way to understand other kinds of cinema. But it comes, you know? It arrives.
DONAL: So in a way the festival is a way for you to all discover new cinema.
LUCA: Oh, of course. But I think it’s always like this. You grow up with the stuff that you do. You are part of the stuff that you do and the stuff that you do is part of you. It’s kind of a mix. I would probably be less interested in experimental cinema without the festival… But it came out that I started to organise it so little by little… I don’t know if I could ever watch Anger or Michael Snow’s movies in my life if I did not crash into the Lucca Film Festival. But fortunately I did—that’s, you know, fate or destiny or whatever it is.
DONAL: And in terms of the audience…
LUCA: In terms of the audience [sighs] … We really have to talk about that? It’s one of your questions? We can’t jump it?
DONAL: No, I think it’s really interesting.
LUCA: [reluctantly] Yeah, it’s interesting….
DONAL: There were some films where I was really surprised at how many people came.
LUCA: Really?
DONAL: Some of the Michael Snow films were quite packed.
LUCA: [surprised] Ah!
DONAL: Like I think at Back and Forth there was…
LUCA: Yeah, there were people. But you know the fact is that Lucca is not…Lucca in Tuscany is the city more…how can I say… for example, more Catholic. This is the first part. Then it’s really closeminded. Then it’s not really open to…. [sees someone behind me] Oh! She’s one of my ex-girlfriends. One of the best actually.
He greets his ex and chats with her. She hangs out and listens in for a while.
LUCA: What was I talking about?
DONAL: The audience. And Lucca, what people in Lucca are like.
LUCA: Yeah, they are shit people in Lucca, actually… [remembers his ex-girlfriend is there] …except for some people around. So it’s really not worth to convince people to come to the cinema.
DONAL: But local people do come. Sometimes.
LUCA: Yeah, sometimes. For the normal cinema, as we were calling it before, yeah. For the experimental cinema it’s more and more difficult. Of course we have to try to get people from the outside. … People that can really come from outside—like Max, Max is one of the most… [trails off]
[Irish filmmaker and critic Max le Cain at the end of a hard day's viewing. It's rumoured Max often refused to leave the cinema at night and forced Pip Chodorov to show him films until dawn.]
Because, of course, when you do something really particular, you have to try to get people from outside… This year we have a really good press office, this is quite important. Because if all around Italy they know about the Michael Snow retrospective, maybe people can start to come. But if only in Tuscany they know about Michael Snow retrospective… So we are working on it, but I think for audiences, the first edition was the best. And it was in the cinema that year [This year's programme took place in a church converted into a theatre]. The cinema is always a different state of mind for the audience, if it’s the cinema, they have that sense of “ok, I’m going to the cinema”.
DONAL: So when you decided to have a festival here…
LUCA: We were not thinking about the audience.
DONAL: No? You weren’t thinking you wanted to shake up Lucca?
LUCA: Well, you know, we have to work…little by little. But there are some of us that really don’t care about the audience at all. Me, I care; I like people to come. But for example Andrea says, “Why audience, why? Who cares about audience? It’s not important at all.” Of course, that’s why we are so…heterogenous, so different. Because there are people in the organisation who think in a certain kind of way, others think in another… And of course this causes a lot of problems, fights, not fights but…quarrelling…
DONAL: That was going to be my next question.
LUCA: Yeah yeah, we quarrel a lot, of course.
DONAL: Every other festival I’ve been to…
LUCA: They have one boss.
DONAL: Yeah. But here there’s six or seven of you?
LUCA: Seven of us decide.
DONAL: And nobody’s in charge, really? It’s communal.
LUCA: OK… Nicola, in a certain way, should be the boss. But he’s the boss only for certain bureacratic stuff. When we have to take decisions we do it all together. So sometimes when, for example, I’m on my bike in Rome doing some other stuff, it could be “so we have to decide about this, we have three votes for this, two votes for this, what do you think about that?” I say “can I think about this, I’m on the bike, I’m doing shopping”—no, I don’t do shopping, but I’m doing something else. And they say, “Yeah, but you have to decide.” Blah blah blah, stuff like this. But it’s fun, it’s fun in the end. I work in another festival where of course everything is more organised, more planned, blah blah blah. But there is not the spirit of Lucca, you know? That’s why we enjoy it so much. We are a group of friends at the end (or we should be a group of friends) and…. So it’s… It’s mixed up… It’s a mix of stuff… Work and…
Lucca drops Alessandro’s camera—looks around nervously to see if he saw.
He didn’t.
LUCA: And friendship… It’s everything mixed, you know?
A man with long grey hair walks by on crutches.
LUCA: [to the man] And the book that he has to give me! [to me] And everything. Then, the city’s little so we know everyone. For me, it’s strange because I came back to the city where I lived for four years for a kind of festival. If they had asked me three years ago “are you gonna organise a festival in Lucca?” I would say “Lucca, why? I’m gonna live in Rome.” But in the end I’m really happy to do that.
LUCA: You have some other questions there?
Luca starts pretending to film again.
DONAL: Let’s talk about all the extra-cinematic events that are taking place in the festival—you have exhibitions of Michael Snow and Aldo Tambellini, musical and performance art events…
LUCA: Yeah yeah. We have been thinking about this since the first year, but this year we managed to do this kind of stuff because we started to do some collaborations, you know with the school, with the Fondazione Ragghianti and a strong collaboration the city council, and stuff like this. We would like to do more of this because we think it’s not good to close yourself inside cinema, you know, just to think about cinema. The experimental cinema has always been linked to video art and fine art, so why not do that? We were also going to do the VJ performance, you know, with Steven Ball and Martin Blažíček….but unfortunately they didn’t like us so much and we were not able to make them like us. [Ball and Blažíček were going to do a live collaborative mix of footage shot in Lucca during the festival. A few days before this was planned, they mysteriously decided not to and disappeared...]
DONAL: Also there’s a few films screened this year which were actually shot at the festival last year.
LUCA: Ah, this is the thing that personally I really love! Because it is like to create something that can grow out in the years, you know? Last year we screened Adolfo’s movie that was done in the first year of Lucca and he hasn’t done movies for more than 10 years, and then he decide when he was in Lucca it was so fine, he was drinking, smoking joints all day and eh…—can I say smoking joints?
DONAL: You can say whatever you like.
LUCA: He liked Lucca so he decided to make this forty minute movie, which was of course Adolfo’s…
LUCA: He shot it part in Paris and part in Lucca, and then when we showed it last year. This year we did Antoine [Barraud]’s movies and the Stephen Dwoskin interview. I think this is wonderful but it’s a thing that they do in big festials as well, for example in Locarno they often do something like that, because people…going into Locarno and they are fine you know because in Locarno you can really have a good time, and then they come back and edit what they filmed, and then sometimes it happens that they screen it—but these are things you can do only at festivals kind of familiar, you know, really…
DONAL: Intimate.
LUCA: Because if not you have to send it to be in competition, blah blah blah. Here, we like to— I hope your movie’s going to be in our festival next year. We like that people come here with a video camera and they film. It became part of the— Tonino’s movie… Tonino de Bernardi’s movie, not this one, the one before that I haven’t seen yet, it’s filmed part here, and he decided to film it. Last year he came with all the troops, which is like three people, but all the troops, plus some actors, and they filmed in the Villa, and parts here, and he has everything planned, it’s not just that he decided to interview people and just to do it, he has a plan, you know: “I’m going to film part of the movie in Lucca and Lucca Film Festival is going to be part of the…” so-called production which is not really a production. And the two girls here are now making a movie on Apra; they are interviewing him here in Lucca… This is going to continue.
DONAL: So have you any plans for next year’s festival?
LUCA: Oh yeah lots. But we have lots of personal plans. Yeah but we are all thinking about something for the next year’s festival… But we haven’t started to talk… But there is one thing more or less decided if we are going to do the festival (because we never know) is a Jonas Mekas retrospective. You know Mekas?
DONAL: Yeah! I was thinking you should do that!
LUCA: Yeah, of course. And then we’ll do Stan Brakhage, this is for sure, you don’t have to….Mekas already knows that we are thinking about something like this. And then we are going to do something Italian, probably, like Tavianis, but I’d like to do something younger. OK, I like part of the cinema of Tavianis but they already have enough. They’re famous, they’re prestigious. I’d like to do something with good young Italian filmmakers—maybe kind of independent but already a little bit known. And then I don’t know, we are gonna think about some experimental underground but in the same way kind of famous like Snow, for the next year. I don’t know: I’m thinking about Straub—but I’m thinking about Straub. But this is my idea—I don’t know if they agree…
He calls to Alessandro about Straub in Italian. Alessandro comes back…
ALESSANDRO: [shocked] You interviewed him, not me?
DONAL: You didn’t come back.
ALESSANDRO: I’m coming.
DONAL: Getting Pip Chodorov [experimental filmmaker and head of Re:Voir to give a lecture on experimental cinema to local teenagers seemed like a great idea as well.
LUCA: Yeah, it's pretty common to do lectures for high school pupils. We did it last year too. It was better last year—not a better lecture, but there were more pupils. This year there was not a lot of people actually. But here in Italy it’s normal, you do stuff for the pupils….
[Pip Chodorov, facing us, talks to Michael Snow and his wife.]
I notice Andrea sitting by himself at the other table. He’s not the most enthusiastic talker but I decide to throw a few questions his way.
DONAL: Andrea can I ask you one question, on camera? I just wanted to ask you about the audience. What you think about the audience at the festival. I’ll come over and ask you… No just, I was talking to Lucca about the audience you get, the local audience? And he was saying some people care about it and some people don’t. What do you think?
ANDREA: I think that cinema is….life, life is cinema and….. I don’t know, I’m really tired.
DONAL: Ok, that was a good answer, thanks.
I return to Luca and Alessandro. Luca’s stolen my camera.
LUCA: Now I’m going to interview. I’m not kidding. So, what do you think about Lucca film festival?
DONAL: It’s fantastic. I’ve had a great time.
LUCA: Yeah but it’s not enough. You have to talk more. It will be not an interview, you know.
DONAL: But that’s my tape. I don’t want an interview with myself.
LUCA: Why? Of course. You are at the Lucca Film Festival, you have to talk about the Lucca Film Festival. Why did you decide to come, how did you find your accomodation?
DONAL: It’s great. I only met the people I live with once, on the first day, and I’ve never seen them since. And every morning they leave me a little breakfast treat. So I have to think of a present to get them when I go. What do you think I should get them?
ALESSANDRO: Flowers.
DONAL: Some flowers?
LUCA: Some flowers, nah….
ALESSANDRO: Do you like flowers?
DONAL: I wouldn’t like flowers.
ALESSANDRO: This is the military’s question. “Do you like flowers?”
DONAL: They ask you that in the military?
ALESSANDRO: In Italy, yeah. Fortunately we didn’t have to do that, because they got rid of the draft in 1983.
LUCA: As the old men say here, you could have done better in the army. You need it!
DONAL: Is there any more champagne?
Alessandro gives me his glass.
DONAL: Drink yours?
ALESSANDRO: I can’t see other glasses. You’d have to stand up, and go there. It’s not comfortable. Anyway, that was one of the questions on the form, to decide if you are a normal person or not. I like flowers.
DONAL: So what was the greatest challenge of the festival this year?
LUCA: To drink a lot during the festival days. [We don't laugh; we're too busy drinking.] OK, I’m going to leave you guys…
Luca gives me back the camera and wanders off.
ALESSANDRO: It was transport, of course. Taking the guests, taking people, to where they have to live, where they have to stay, each night. I was lucky because I have no driving licence. So I just have to see these problems and try to think about them.
DONAL: Was there more guests this year than other years?
ALESSANDRO: Far more. Apparently there were something like 50 or 60 over the whole festival. I don’t believe it but I’ve been told this.
DONAL: Let’s talk about the audience. Is it difficult getting locals to come?
ALESSANDRO: Well, my idea is to…to bring Lucca, to take Lucca…to make people come from outside. Because I’m not in love with people from Lucca. That’s a euphemism… So I think indeed some people came from outside, from the northeast, also some people from outside Italy, there were a lot of French people… I’m not doing the festival in Lucca because I love the people of Lucca, but just because I’m living here. That’s where I live, that’s where I can do something. I would love people to come from New York, Toronto, just to see the films we’ve scheduled.
DONAL: So you’re not worried about getting local people to go to the films?
ALESSANDRO: [hesitates] I don’t care…. I don’t care because I… The problem is if you have a few people coming—well that’s what I’ve been told because I’m not inside these fucking little money things—you know the business. What I’ve been told is that if people won’t come, they won’t keep giving us the very little money that they do give us… I’d just love people to come because they love the films we’re screening, and maybe they love the atmosphere, because that is the festival for me. So if people from Lucca won’t, I don’t give a fuck, I don’t give a shit, you know. Is that the word in English? [laughs] I don’t give a fucking shit. It’s their fault, it’s not mine. The festival was here. But the problem is that—that’s what I’ve been told because I know nothing about that—if we don’t have a certain number of people coming, we won’t have money enough to that next year, or something like that.
DONAL: But some of the screenings seem to do quite well. Even the Snow films.
ALESSANDRO: Yeah, yeah. You saw last night, it was eleven o’clock at night, there was a lot of people. Yeah, I thought it was a success.
DONAL: How did you discover experimental cinema?
ALESSANDRO: There are some of us who don’t like experimental cinema at all. That’s what maybe Luca was telling you before, about the two different spirits. Well, everything all depends on what you mean by experimental. For example, my most favourite example is Adolfo Arrieta, because I really love him as a person and I adore his films.
[Adolfo Arrieta, left, announces the festival winners with Nicola.]
But some of us in the organisation, they don’t like them at all, his films. They also find them boring, which is for me the most, the furthest thing from what they are… You have to see them again. I will make you some copies. …There are one or two or three of us, who doesn’t like even Tam Tam, for example… That’s what I wanted to say. I can’t remember the question.
DONAL: It was about how you got interested in cinema, and avant-garde films in particular.
ALESSANDRO: Oh yeah, maybe I told you: the first edition was quite different, more traditional cinema… So we met some very interesting people right here at the festival. Pip Chodorov, who’s very important to me, because of his approach to to experimental cinema. He really is a master to me.
DONAL: What is it about Pip?
ALESSANDRO: The way he loves experimental cinema and he understands it. He distributes it, that’s his work. Yeah, that’s it. And we have the chance to see some films that very few persons can see, thanks to him, thanks to other guys who came. So it’s…we owe a lot to them, you know.
DONAL: How did you get interested in cinema as a kid? Did you start off liking commercial films and then discovered the “other” films?
ALESSANDRO: Well, if you call Buster Keaton commercial. I think that’s because of my uncle, I mean, you met him. … It’s a funny thing because once my house went on fire, you know? And I had to spend—this was more than 12 years ago—I had to spend a week, because I had asthma… the traces of smoke, you know, which were in my house. I couldn’t stay there, I went to my grandmother’s house where my uncle used to live, and he showed me a lot of beautiful things, I mean the silent films, for example, from the beginning… Pudovkin, Dziga Vertov, Buster Keaton… But I don’t know, we’re not talking about me…
DONAL: Well, I was asking about you.
ALESSANDRO: Maybe that was the beginning… My uncle was the first very important influence on me, and then Pip of course and Arrieta, who was introduced to us by Enrico Ghezzi. He just told us, there was a Spanish director that Marco Melani loved a lot, and nobody knew him (of course, nobody knows him now also). And he gave me the number of the Spanish national cinematheque, who should have the number of Arrieta, and so I called the cinematheque and they gave me the number of Arrieta and I called Arrieta… I didn’t know anything about him, and he knew nothing about me. I just explained him we were doing something on Marco Melani.
A charming bald man shows up. They laugh at “Pisa Merda”. Nicola shows up wearing a suit. We laugh at his suit (and also because he looks a little like Batman when he smiles).
ALESSANDRO: Sorry, I’m losing myself.
We laugh.
DONAL: It’s fine. It’s gonna look great.
ALESSANDRO: It’s not just because I’m drunk. I’m always like that. Even if I’m not drunk. I’m always losing… It’s not that I like to talk a lot; I don’t like to talk. Well, I like it but it’s not the reason that I talk… I like to talk with nice people, but I’m not talking so much because I like it. But just because I would like to be clear, and I never know—I never know—even with my best friends if I’m really clear or not so I keep talking and talking and explaining and explaining…I’m sorry.
DONAL: I feel the same way, even just speaking in English; I always feel like I’m not quite saying what I mean.
Alessandro nods in recognition.
I run out of tape so we decide to end the interview. As we get up to return to the rest of the drunk guests, Alessandro decides to mention one more thing. He asks me what I thought of See You Later (1990), a Michael Snow film consisting of one brief, brilliantly constructed image of Snow leaving his office at the end of the day, but slowed down so that it lasts for 18 minutes. I mention something about the meticulous composition and use of colour—Alessandro agrees, but adds (and you can see the passion building in his eyes) that what astonished him most about it was, while many experimental films create abstract images, See You Later managed to turn quotidian human movement into something abstract—that is something enchanting, alien, unidentifiable—yet still just a man leaving an office.
“It changed my life,” he tells me.
[The screening of Michael Snow's La Region Centrale (1971).]
Thanks to Chiara Caterina for the additional photos.
2007’s BEST…
Monday, December 31st, 2007
FIVE LIVE EVENTS
• Joanna Newsom, Olympia Theatre
• Lisa Germano, Douglas Hyde Gallery
• This Dancing Life, choreographed by Sara Rudner, St Michael and John’s Church
• Ibsen’s Nora, directed by Thomas Ostermeier, the Schaubuehne, Berlin
• Jenny Lindfors, Crawdaddy
FIVE EXHIBITIONS
• “Zero Degree: The New Image of Thought” curated by Esperanza Collado, Thisisnotashop gallery
• “Beyond Cinema: The Art of Projection (films, videos and installations from 1963 to 2005)” curated by Gabriele Knapstein and Joachim Jäger, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin
• “Michael Snow: Cinema, Installazioni, Video e Arti Visuali” curated by Vittorio di Fagone, Fondazione Ragghianti, Lucca, Italy
• “Villes/Cities/Städte”, Raymond Depardon, Museum für Fotografie, Berlin
• “Tulsa” and “Teenage Lust”, Larry Clark, Museum für Fotografie, Berlin
FIVE LECTURES
• Pip Chodorov, “Free Radicals: the story of the Avant-Garde”, Lucca Film Festival
• Christopher Doyle, “What I Do When I’m Where I Am”, Kimchi Bar, DEAF
• Brian Winston, closing speech at Documentary in the 21st Century conference, DLIADT
• Dr. Harvey O’Brien, “Electrocuting the Elephant” at Documentary in the 21st Century conference, DLIADT
• Derrick Jensen, “Endgame” (click here and here to listen)
FIVE NEW FILMS
• Inland Empire (David Lynch)
• Nightshots (Stephen Dwoskin)
• Medea (Tonino de Bernardi)
• We Own the Night (James Gray)
• Into the Wild (Sean Penn)
FIVE OLD FILMS
• Le Lit de la Vierge (Philippe Garrel, 1969)
• Route One / USA (Robert Kramer, 1989)
• Back and Forth (Michael Snow, 1969)
• Carpicci (Carmelo Bene, 1969)
• Manuel on the Island of Wonders (Raul Ruiz, 1984)
ONE NEW IRISH FILM
• Garage (Lenny Abrahamson)
FIVE NEW ALBUMS
• Ys, Joanna Newsom
• In the Maybe World, Lisa Germano
• Into the Wild, Eddie Vedder
• Modern Times, Bob Dylan
• Kala, M.I.A.
FIVE OLD ALBUMS
• The Absent and the Distant, Corrina Repp, 2006
• Countless Times, Diane Cluck, 2005
• Oh Vanille/Ova Nil, Diane Cluck, 2005
• In My Own Time, Karen Dalton, 1971
• Transatlanticism, Death Cab for Cutie, 2003
EXPERIMENTAL SPACES
Monday, December 31st, 2007
[Filmmakers] explored different ways of linking the diverse physical equipment; one of their solutions would eventually be endorsed as “normal” (camera / projector / screen / screening room) the others to be considered “expanded” cinema. Yet it is this “normal” solution which should by all rights and purposes be dubbed “restricted cinema,” precisely because experimental film reminds us of so many other possibilities…. -
— Nicole Brenez, “Jeune, Dure et Pure: A history of avant-garde and experimental film in France”
I was unsure about skipping this year’s Cork Film Festival at first. Despite a mostly lacklustre programme, it did boast one very interesting event involving British experimental filmmaker John Smith, who I had met a few weeks earlier at the Lucca Film Festival. Smith’s series of hotel video diaries were to be screened for the first time all together…and they were to be screened in John Smith’s hotel room—the kind of alternative screening set-up I’ve becoming increasingly interested in. However, intriguing an experiment as this sounded, taking place in Dublin at the same time was an even weirder expansion of a film screening environment. “Zero Degree: The New Image of Thought” was a three-night exhibition of avant-garde cinema, curated by Esperanza Collado and taking place at Thisisnotashop gallery. The exhibition, coinciding with the release of the new issue of Collado’s avant-garde zine, Spectrum, projected films simultaneously onto each wall of the tiny one-room gallery: for the most part, one filmmaker per wall per night.
The open shop-window front of the gallery meant you could also see the films from the streets, from the tram which passes right outside its door, or on the window’s reflection if you were on the inside. This decentralised layout managed to feel both open (no set place to stand, no set place to look) and invasive (wherever you looked, there was moving images, and wherever you stood, you were in someone’s line of sight) and raised several interesting questions about the spectator’s role in the situation: namely, what do you do in a space like this? What’s the etiquette? How are you supposed to view the films? Until Collado set a few things straight in her introduction, most people had been politely hushed and awkwardly huddled in different corners, focusing on one screen and trying their best not to get in anyone else’s way. But such an approach was awkward for a reason; Collado explained she’d set up the projections to mitigate precisely against that kind of reverent, mannered passivity. Stand wherever you like, she urged; talk, drink, laugh—block the projectors if you want. Things loosened up from that point onwards: people would stand outside chatting and glancing in, or converse inside with films projecting on their faces. Then they might wander around, soaking up the films silently until they bumped into someone else. This freeform arrangement shifted and varied, ebbed and flowed, depending on how many people were in the room, who those people were and, of course, what films were on the walls.
The films chosen were an impressive cross-section of the canonic avant-garde—Paul Sharits and Peter Kubelka’s flicker films, William Burrough’s cut-ups, Stan Brakhage’s moving paintings, Bruce Conner’s found footage poems—as well as one artist, Takahiko Iimura, that I hadn’t heard of. Things didn’t stick exactly to the written programme, however, and different films were screened different nights depending on the mood and audience requests. The overarching theme, as expanded on in the tie-in issue of Spectrum, was the interval—a philosophical/theoretical concept which is so simple and elemental and it can be extremely confounding (especially if you try reading Gilles Deleuze for an explanation). Here’s my crude understanding: the interval is just that; the interval, the gap between. This can be between one shot and another, one frame and another, between the projector and the image, or the image and the spectator. It’s that moment of between-ness, in any case; neither one thing or the other, but defining both by its absence. It’s a fitting theme for an exhibition that experiments with that encompassing and immensely powerful interval: space.
I’ve written before about the limitations of the contemporary fashion of spatial or environmentally focused art, but the distinction between “Zero Degree” and something like Antony Gormley’s Blind Light is that Collado makes no claims that her spatial arrangement is the artwork itself, nor does the spectator (participant is perhaps a better word…) tend to think of it that way. Rather, it’s a form of curatorial intervention; a display of artworks designed to facilitate certain kinds of engagement and relationship and obstruct others.
I know a good few cinephiles who would positively detest such an irreverent set-up (and it’s significant that the bulk of those who attended the films were engaged in the fine art scene). Indeed, some people in attendance expressed frustration at the difficulty of concentrating or becoming absorbed by one particular film. Given the increasing ubiquity of moving images in the modern world and the corresponding proclivity to scan over them and move on, never really looking deeply, I can appreciate this attachment to concentration and absorption. But at the same time, as someone who feels deeply ambivalent about the innately passive and escapist tendencies of the traditional cinema-going set-up, I welcome any attempts to subvert it. Unlike most film festivals (with the recent wonderful exception of Lucca), in which activities are starkly segregated between sitting-down-watching-films time and getting-drunk-and-schmoozing-time (basically nothing more than intensely concentrated versions of the two hugely dominant forms of social activity in Ireland), “Zero Degrees” blends artistic and social experience together in a way that ultimately enriches both of them.
Marshall McLuhan’s old saying “the medium is the message” is a tired, but indispensable, axiom and one worth bringing into the discussion here. With cinema, it’s often used (by myself included) to argue the key importance of form in determinating the effect and meaning of a film, irrespective of any overtly espoused themes or messages. However, it’s rarely used to analyse how the ways in which a film is viewed can determine its meaning or effect. If one considers McLuhan’s phrase the way Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner do in their book, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, it’s certainly applicable:
From this perspective, one is invited to see that the most important impressions made on a human nervous system come from the character and structure of the environment within which the nervous system functions; that the environment itself conveys the critical and dominant messages by controlling the perceptions and attitudes of those who participate in it. Dewey stressed that the role an individual is assigned in an environment—what he is permitted to do—is what the individual learns. In other words, the medium itself, i.e. the environment, is the message. ‘Message’ here means the perceptions you are allowed to build, the attitudes you are enticed to assume, the sensitivities you are encouraged to develop—almost all of the things you learn to see and feel and value. You learn them because your environment is organised in such a way that it permits or encourages or insists that you learn them.
It seems symptomatic of the tendency towards insularity in film culture that it’s the only art form not really grappling with these questions, and yet one more reason why experimental cinema is so important as a way of breaking open “restricted cinema” and reminding us of the “many other possibilities” Brenez talks about. In the past year or two, I’ve seen dance groups such as ETXEA, John Jasperse Company and IMDT, musical events such as DATA and the server project, wider cultural projects such as Mamuska and Seomra Spraoi, and fine art events too numerous to mention—all deeply concerned with the impact of “the role an individual is assigned in an environment” and exploring alternative paradigms of the audience/art relationship in order to address it.
Why shouldn’t this be happening in cinema?
10 MIRACLES OF LUCCA
Saturday, November 10th, 2007
In lieu of my full report on the Lucca Film Festival (which I’m going to start any day now, honest), here’s a list of the highlights: the ten most astonishing, beautiful, unlikely, unexpected—nay, miraculous—things that happened at that wonderful and crazy event.
1. Adolfo Arrieta.
2. Festival intern Valeria Guarino cooking me spaghetti after my arrival in Lucca at 1am, happily announcing, “Italy—is this”.
3. The last-minute surprise screening (guest curated by Greek filmmaker/curator Vassily Bourikas) of the nearly impossible to see Hungarian film DREAM RECONSTRUCTIONS (1977), directed by Miklós Erdély within the legendary Béla Balázs Studio.
4. Michael Snow’s BACK AND FORTH (1969).
5. My chaotic interview with a few of the festival organisers during one of their daily experimental drinking sessions. Occasionally one would get distracted and wander away, only to be replaced by another happy to pick up where the last guy left off—until their ex-girlfriend happened to walk by and interrupt them. And then, behind them, Antoine Barraud would appear holding a sign declaring “Pisa Merde”….
6. Britain’s most famous experimental filmmaker John Smith sliding underneath a restaurant table and crawling out to avoid disturbing the six fellow guests sitting beside him.
7. Experimental filmmaker and distributor Pip Chodorov’s two-day crash course in experimental cinema for local Lucca teenagers, including 16mm screenings of the best of Kubelka, Fischinger, Baillie, Richter, Arnold, Breer, Sharits and (most painfully for the kids) Brakhage’s first childbirth movie, WINDOW WATER BABY MOVING (1962).
8. Dancing to an accordion player outside Trattoria Buralli waiting to be seated for our lunch, while rich tourists ate pasta and gawked.
9. Dancing to gangsta rap from a car radio, underneath the 13th century facade of the Ascension on San Frediano Church.
10. The astronomical number of puns Irish filmmaker/critic Maximilian le Cain was able to generate involving Michael Snow’s surname.
Did I mention Adolfo Arrieta?
(Photo by Chiara Caterina.)
3 WEEKS IN BERLIN pt. 5: CODA
Saturday, November 10th, 2007
I went to this party in Berlin that a guy called Doug Fender was having.
It was happening in the basement of an apartment building in Kreuzberg, in a space called the “Boom Boom Theatre”.
It had a kitchen, a garden and a big room with a piano.
There was food, wine, dancing…
…singing, joking, talking…
…Or maybe it wasn’t a party.
Maybe it was a show.
THAT MORNING…
I slept on a bridge.
On a mattress.
THE GOOD CURATOR: an interview with Marc Siegel
Monday, November 5th, 2007
As an appendix to my series of posts on Berlin, I wanted to dredge up this interview I did with Marc Siegel at the Berlinale in February. Siegel, a teacher at the Free University in Berlin, was curating a remarkable programme entitled “Underground/Overseas” as part of the Berlinale’s Forum Expanded section. The programme brought together and traced the links between several strands of underground cinema from the 1960s: principally, the Zanzibar collective in Paris and, in New York, the work of Jack Smith and the films that came out of Andy Warhol’s Factory. Siegel, as a member of the artist’s collective CHEAP, was also involved in turning the Arsenal Kino’s usually desolate foyer into a bar/bookshop/screening-room/hangout entitled the “Gossip Studio”.
My week and a half at the Berlinale was mostly taken up with the Talent Campus and Talent Press, so unfortunately I was only able to catch one film in Siegel’s series, Phillippe Garrel’s astonishing (and astonishingly well attended) 1969 film Le Lit de la Vierge. But I did manage to grab Siegel for a half an hour in the Gossip Studio and ask him a few questions. Coming from Ireland, a much more timid and muted culture when it comes to curation, I was intrigued by the breadth, eclecticism and imaginative juxtaposition involved in Siegel’s series—and equally, the fact that Berlin provided a cultural climate where such an undertaking was not only viable but well-received.
—————————————————————————————————————
How did you first get involved with the Arsenal Kino?
I’m not exactly sure. I got to know the people here and I think I knew some teachers who had done series here in conjunction with their seminars and so I just talked to them about doing that.
Is that a common thing, for individuals outside of the Arsenal to come in and curate programmes?
Yeah, the Arsenal is very open to that. They do have very limited finances so with most film series that I would programme in conjunction with my classes, I don’t have any money from the university to fund that, and I don’t have any outside money to fund that, so we’re dependent either on the films they have in their own archive, of which there are many—I think about 8,000 titles in the Freunde der Deutschen Kinamethek archive—or films that are in distribution in Germany or in other archives here in Germany that would not be too expensive for them to get. Because they can’t take too many big financial risks.
But when it came to “Underground/Overseas”, I had the concept, I applied for a grant from the City of Berlin, from their cultural funding agency, and talked to the Arsenal in advance and had letters of support from them. And then I brought in all the money for the films, to pay myself, to pay to invite guests here to travel and all that.
I take it your program was initially separate from the festival?
Yeah, my series was conceived independently of the Berlinale. But when I submitted the application, I spoke with Stefanie Schulte Strathaus from the Arsenal about the program. She wrote a letter of support and said it sounds like the kind of thing that the Forum Expanded would be interested in. And it worked out conveniently because I was doing it also in conjunction with a seminar and I needed to have the series sometime during the semester. The funding meant it had to be in 2007 so that meant the only time I could do it was January and February. And in February the Arsenal is busy with the Forum….so yeah, then we came to the decision, “let’s have the high points, the really unique works, in the Forum.” Which was actually kind of difficult because it was a series where every single film was so unique–I mean people maybe say that about every series they do—but in this case it was dealing with experimental work, dealing with work that in just about every case has never shown in Germany before so it was difficult to say which is rarer than the rare. But we did make a kind of selection that the selection committee here at the Forum looked at.
What was the attendance of the series like overall?
Well, there were quite a lot of films or programmes – I think I had just about 25 programmes within a month, so it was a lot of film viewing. Audiences varied from maybe a 100 for the opening night to maybe 30 at the worst. I think probably an average was like 40 people maybe.
You were saying being part of the Berlinale helped with the audience numbers to an extent. I was amazed with the turnout at Garrel’s Le Lit de la Vierge for example.
Well, I think there is a lot of interest in Garrel, in particular these early films because they haven’t shown very often and they have a kind of cult status. I made that clear in my series by highlighting the connection with Nico, who Garrel married, because of the Warhol connection. But we actually had shown a sneak preview of Le Lit de la Vierge earlier—it was advertised as a Garrel evening but people didn’t know which film would show and there we had maybe 60 people, which was not bad—but the cinema I think seats just about 200 or 230. Then it was completely over-sold-out for the festival.
But I didn’t know what to expect and actually, I was really thrilled that there were so many people. For all of the screenings in my series—the Jack Smith, the Warhol, the Garrel and Jackie Raynal’s film, Deux Fois (1968)—they were almost all sold out. And that was so exciting. I didn’t know what to expect because at the Berlin Film Festival, usually people come to see new films. Or if they’re gonna see old films it’s films in the retrospective. But one of the nice things that I find with the Forum Expanded is that it’s open to a variety of different works: different kinds of works, not just experimental work but installation, works of varying lengths—you can have a 30minute film, a 45 minute film or like a 7 hour film; things that won’t normally fit into a festival so easily and then also older works, particularly if there’s a strong thematic link. So it ended up working really quite well and hopefully the attention it’s received will show people here that there is a place for these newly discovered or rediscovered or less known, classic experimental films.
Do you have a sense of what kind of people make up the audience for this kind of series? Is it mostly people directly involved in the arts?
Definitely it’s a lot of those people but I don’t think it’s just those people. I know with my series, there was a large variety of people. A lot of students coming because they’ve heard about Warhol, they don’t get a chance to see these early films very often. For Warhol and Smith you get a big gay crowd also—from people who know that these are really important predecessors to current queer cinema, or just legendary figures who dealt with sexual diversity and gender diversity in their work. Also different generations of people: there are people who are interested in this ‘68 or ’60s scene who came, younger people but also people from that time period who wanted to kind of revisit work that they saw 40 years ago. It was quite a diverse crowd.
Tell us about CHEAP, the artist’s collective that your involved in.
We work together mostly in performance: we’ve done shows in nightclubs, for a long time we did a monthly night in a club, and we work with lots of different people. We’ve worked with Wilhelm Hein, an experimental filmmaker here in Germany, where he would project his films at this club, films from his archives, and his girlfriend Annetta Frick projected slides of her photos. I chose videos and then we all dressed up in crazy ways, played music and had performances.
It seems like there’s a lot of cultural cross-fertilisation that goes on around here.
Yeah…I mean I wish there was more of it. I do think that the CHEAP constellation is somewhat unique, our group of people and the kind of crossover events we’re involved in. I know there’s B_Books here, who have a book table in the Gossip Studio and they’re also another kind of collective. They have their bookstore, which is their base, and they have a press, but they also do a lot of video production and conference organising and stuff. So they do a lot of different things and all the individuals there are involved at the same time in some kind of academic way or art school teaching way as well as art production. But I don’t know how many academics there are who do this sort of crossover thing; I think unfortunately there are too few.
Coming from Ireland, I’m really amazed by the richness of cultural activity going on here, and the degree to which people are engaged with it. I’ve been trying to figure out what it is that makes this possible.
I actually think economics play a big role: the existence of a lot of major granting agencies, federal agencies, local agencies, that support cultural projects from individuals. There’s that; there’s also a really lively press, and a really lively cultural, political and intellectual scene in general. Compared to the States, I think there is a broader acceptance of an intellectual culture here. Like in the US, there is no place for intellectuals who are not institutionally affiliated.
I was also surprised when I came here that people, like yourself, who organise film series are commonly called curators rather than film programmers.
It’s funny, yeah. I’ve heard that used for years, even in the States, in reference to film programmers. It’s something I felt really uncomfortable with….
But you are comparing and contrasting and making parallels, not just doing a retrospective of a period or a person. It’s almost like montage in a sense.
Right, in that sense it’s creative. But it’s also academic. I felt like this series, at the same time as being a creative juxtaposition of works, was also an academic project, and I worried that it would be too academic, because I know that part of what motivated me was a scholarly question of historical connections: I was really interested in trying to trace these connections. Maybe you could say the motivation behind the series was academic but then, the practical realisation of the series was creative because when you sit there in the cinema, all the academic context stuff can easily fall away and what you’re left with is just the films and the questions they provoke: “How do these films fit together in the program? How do they connect with the films you saw maybe last week from this series?” So those are maybe more aesthetic, formal concerns that arise as you go along.
I mean, I was really excited about this series and for me it was the most involved, extensive, maybe daring series that I’ve done. The others have been more traditional arthouse programming: I did something on Hong Kong New Wave, something on Polish New Wave from the 50s, the Taiwanese New Wave… So it was more national cinemas or particular movements or periods in film history, or individuals: I did something on Carmelo Bene, the Italian director. Whereas this was the first time where I really went in there and said, “I’m really gonna yank something out of this national cinema context and I’m going to compare it with this other thing”. I think that’s an important thing to do, particularly with experimental films. And there is more of that kind of programming here at the Arsenal, I’m not unique in that sense.
Do you try to program films based on some idea of their contemporary relevance? Like there’s a reason that these films should be seen at this particular time?
Yeah, definitely. And with everything I do, I try to think about what is its relevance today. I don’t want to just pick a subject because I think it’s historically important—or rather, I feel like something is historically important in as much as it speaks to us today and in that sense, it’s important in programming to try to have some idea of how this work can speak to people now. Because there’s lots of really important films out there and tons of forgotten filmmakers but there’s only a certain amount of money to put this stuff together and time and space on a programme so I think you really need to choose from the past carefully, and make it speak to them.
You were saying that you often link in your curating to what you teach on your course? How did that work in this case?
Well, this last term we’ve been looking at the three focal points for my film series: Jack Smith, Andy Warhol and Zanzibar. The basic structure would be: we read a text, see a film and discuss it—the seminar would be about discussing it. That’s something that I would do in all my seminars. What was weird with this one was just that I had so many films and usually force all my students to see every single film that I program but in this case, since I had, as I said, 25 programs over a month I couldn’t expect my students to come to every single program.
Did you source many films here in Germany?
There was just one short film that I used from Berlin. Everything else came from elsewhere: mostly from Lux in England, from Paris, other places in France or from the United States.
What was the process like of getting hold of some of the more obscure films?
Well, with the Jack Smith stuff, I already knew Jerry Tartaglia who was responsible for having restoring and preserving Smith’s work. So I just contacted him, got in touch with him a long time ago about the possibility of showing the work,and he brought it with him personally for these screenings. For the Warhol stuff, I had already programmed Warhol for another series and I knew that the Warhol stuff was all at the Museum of Modern Art, so I just contacted them.
The difficult thing was tracking down a lot of these French films and since I was looking at not just the Zanzibar films but stuff from a kind of broader French underground scene in the 60s, I had to just start sending out questions, you know, sending a note to the Cinémathèque Française and asking, “Do you have these prints?” They would give me leads, so for example there was this really fascinating filmmaker Etienne O’Leary who was very close to Pierre Clementi, the actor and experimental filmmaker, in Paris. I got sent from the Cinémathèque Française to the Cinémathèque Québécoise, because Etienne O’Leary is originally from Quebec, and apparently his films are there. So after a number of attempts to contact someone in Quebec, we found out that they have his films….but they’re not releasing them because they’re too precious. They suggested I contact Etienne O’Leary’s brother in France, who has a Beta copy of them, and that’s what we screened.
The only thing that we got for free in a sense was one of the films I showed at the beginning, Maria Menken’s film Wrestlers (1964), which is something that the Freunde der Deutschen Kinamethek has in their archive—but everything else I had to pay for, and that’s why a series like this is so unusual. But because I had this grant—I had a grant of 25,000 euro to pay for the whole series, and that includes paying me for coming up with it, for doing introductions, paying for translations of subtitling… We showed some in French and we had someone give a spoken, simultaneous translation, so we had to pay to generate that translation. And then to invite guests to come, to pay them a slight honorare for participating in a panel discussion or giving an introduction, and their travel costs, hotel, and then rental costs, transport… It was a lot. And I hope we’re still within the budget, I haven’t had a chance to really clarify that…
A lot of these films were screened for the first time, right?
Yes, a lot of them were. Luckily, the Zanzibar films are almost all going to be brought out on DVD by Re:Voir in Paris and so people will be able to see those, but for example, I showed a film by Taylor Meade, a Warhol actor who also made films in Paris and who was an influential figure in the Parisian scene: his films aren’t gonna be put on DVD. I can’t imagine them being put on DVD anytime soon. Or Etienne O’Leary’s work. Certain things have come out on DVD but as people know in the experimental film scene, you can’t count on that. Also, with the Warhol films, the Warhol Foundation is also just incredibly greedy and they thrive on the rarity of these works, so they’ve been very cautious about allowing any kind of DVD release of these early Warhol films.
I think it’s great that Re:Voir’s bringing this stuff out on DVD, but I do think it’s a shame if people just know these films through DVD, because, like we saw with Le Lit de la Vierge: it’s now out on DVD and I’m sure it’s a great, high quality DVD, but it’s this gorgeous, spacious black and white 35mm cinemascope film and, it’s a tired statement but it’s just such a different experience to see that film on screen. Of course it’s not going to be screened as often as people will pop a DVD in, so there’s that—but I would just hate for us to lose that experience of watching it on screen. You get a completely different relationship to the film, to the images, to the story, to the mood…
Film blogger Zach Campbell argued a while ago that wider availability isn’t always a good thing, that we need certain “Holy Grails” in cinema, such as Bèla Tarr’s Sátántangó (1994) films that you may only get the chance to see once in a lifetime. Would you agree with that?
Well, I wouldn’t want to enforce that kind of rarity. I mean I love the “special event” quality of seeing something like Sátántangó or these Warhol or Jack Smith films—the fact that they are only available to see in the cinema, that it’s a rare occasion, and you have to go or you miss it. It totally frustrates me that friends of mine—who should know better—will stand outside the Jack Smith programme and say, “Oh well do you have that on DVD? ‘Cause I don’t really have time…” It’s like, “NO, it’s not on DVD, you’re not gonna see it if you don’t go in.” And this assumption that everything’s available I find really frustrating. I think it would be a better world if everything was available both as DVD and as film and people were able to recognise that they’re different experiences—but I don’t think like capitalism would allow that. As for the idea of enforced obscurity…that doesn’t interest me all.
Yet wasn’t Jackie Raynal [pictured above] saying in her introduction to Le Lit de la Vierge that Garrel and the other Zanzibar filmmakers didn’t have any interest in getting their work shown?
Well, I think their not having an interest in it doesn’t mean that they necessarily didn’t want it shown. I think it says something more about what they thought about filmmaking; that they had an interest in filmmaking but were not career-minded in thinking of the necessity of screening it, of marketing it in any way; that this was filmmaking as a way of living, as a way of life, and not filmmaking as a way of making a career, making money.
But for instance Andy Warhol took all of his ’60s films out of circulation in the early 70s, and they were unavailable except for bootleg prints—and that seemed to be a specific commercial ploy on his part to make them obscure. Which is different from what, as far as I know, the Zanzibar filmmakers did. They were not at all intentionally trying to make their stuff obscure: they were just that excited about the moment of filmmaking, being able to make these films and not really concerned about being businessmen, or women.
ART OF SUMMER pt. 4: Have U Met Nosti? and other events
Monday, October 15th, 2007
HAVE YOU MET NOSTI?
Back in Dublin and also in July, “Have U Met Nosti?” was a rich and unusual five-day performance art festival organised by Sascha Perfect and the Balkan Irish Arts Forum and focusing on new works (mostly) from the Balkan countries, with works ranging from cabaret to modern dance to more conceptually driven performance art. Overall, the programme was refreshingly uninterested in culturally specific novelties (unlike the Multicultural-with-a-capital-M celebration that is our Festival of World Cultures)—focusing instead on smart, passionate dance and performance, as innovative and theoretically engaged as you’d find anywhere. The standouts for me were REALITY SHOW (Dejan Garbos, Serbia), OUCH COUCH (Iskra Sukarova, Macedonia) and THE AUCTION (Katerina Mojzisova, Slovakia).
It’s hard not to make REALITY SHOW sound like the ultimate performance art cliche, and in its basic concept—two women make out and take all their clothes off while reading a theoretical text on the media-saturated, post-modern body—it….sort of is. But the mixture of flesh and theory is actually strangely effective—seriously—and Garbos’ central argument that even if a body is “naked”, perceptually it’s still wrapped in layer upon layer of cultural, intellectual and sexual prejudice and distortion, manages to be made equally forcefully through the text and the various acts of the performers (although, I’ll concede, squirting lotion on the ground so that one woman could spin the other around in it was a bit much).
Taking place across the creaky floorboards of the Back Loft in the Liberties (where the festival’s final performances and closing party took place), OUCH COUCH was a sharp and witty power-play duet in the dance-as-relationship tradition, using an inflatable couch as the pivot of the dancers’ (Sukarova and Darija Andovska) passive-agressive exchanges. The performance took place in the round, with the audience sitting against the wall, at times perilously close to the action; one little girl watching actually tried to reach out and touch the dancers when they came near her, probably the best expression of the power of this kind of intimate off-stage dance theatre than anything I could put into words here.
Mojzisova’s THE AUCTION was a very funny attempt to economically quantify and commercially redeem dance: the choreographer and dancer performed short excerpts from her own work and then put them up for auction. But at the same time this wasn’t really a joke: the highest bidder really did have to fork over cash for possession of the dance (unfortunately no-one went for the final piece she performed, which she opened bidding for at 30,000 euro.)
The closing party and consequent drinking session was also pretty culturally edifying (most important lesson learnt: Macedonian moonshine is lethal). The Bubble has an episode on “Have U Met Nosti?” that you can watch here, and in which myself and the legendary Benjy Gogan randomly feature at the end.
AND OTHER EVENTS
So what else? There was Mary Dempsey’s WHAT HAPPENED, an audio installation that took place in Meeting House Square in August. There’s not much to say about this intriguing work that Fergus Daly hasn’t already said very eloquently, so I’ll just direct you to his essay on the piece.
There was Electric Picnic, which I caught the final day of: a so-so lineup, overall, apart from the rock-and-roll event that was Iggy Pop’s headlining gig (really more of an interactive performance experiment than a concert), but so rich and innovative in terms of all the extra-musical spectacles and spaces on offer, that it’s still the best camping festival in the country.
Oh, and I almost forgot: probably the most significant dance event in Ireland of the year was Irish Modern Dance Theatre’s production of THIS DANCING LIFE, a joyous and celebratory four-hour show by New York choreographer Sara Rudner. It’s also the first dance I’ve ever really had the chance to study in detail, as I was hired by Irish Modern Dance Theatre to film the show, and I’m currently turning that twelve hours of footage (we had three cameras filming) into a two-DVD, four-hour version of the show. Once that’s completed, I may return to write more about it, perhaps with the illustration of clips….
There was the Fringe Festival, one of Dublin’s biggest and best cultural events, which deserves (and will eventually receive) a post of its own.
And…yeah, I think that was about it.
In other words: it was a good summer.
ART OF SUMMER pt. 3: DARKLIGHT & GALWAY
Monday, October 15th, 2007
The day after I returned from London, I was straight into more films, thanks to the Darklight Symposium, a sort of mini-festival now occuring inbetween the Darklight Festival’s main programme every other year. I’d never really engaged with Darklight before the symposium, mainly due to the impression that they were focused exclusively on digital media to an unproductive degree—but this weekend boasted a very impressive lineup that was not at all restricted to digitial content. Most impressive was the focus on older Irish cinema: three of our most important First Wave filmmakers—Joe Comerford, Pat Murphy and Vivienne Dick—had films showing over the weekend.
I missed Murphy’s and Comerford’s films (as well as the wide range of workshops and panel discussions that took place), but caught the three-film mini-retrospective of Dick’s work curated by Maeve Connolly. While a longer programme would have been desirable, the three chosen films—GUÉRILLIÉRE TALKS (1978), VISIBILITY MODERATE (1981) and SKINNY LITTLE MAN ATTACKS DADDY (1994)—were actually excellent choices, forming a cogent trilogy that showed the progression of Dick’s work from her beginnings in the New York “No Wave” scene through to her return to Ireland and transition to working on video. GUÉRILLIÉRE TALKS is one of the great avant-garde portrait films, a series of seven unedited Super 8 rolls each documenting a different woman. VISIBILITY MODERATE is an insane tour-de-force trek through the eccentricity and hysteria of 1980s rural Ireland, using audio clips from Irish ads and weather forecasts to painfully funny effect. SKINNY LITTLE MAN ATTACKS DADDY, the only of her video works shown, is a more subdued and formal work, owing both to the shift in medium and a more directly personal focus, focusing on her relationship with her family. The work was also accompanied by an excerpt from Fergus Daly’s landmark documentary, EXPERIMENTAL CONVERSATIONS (2006) in which Dick features (and which, as far as I know, Maximilian le Cain has been the only one to write at length about).
The other highlight of the symposium was the double bill screening of Michael Snow’s WAVELENGTH (1967, pictured above) and Hollis Frampton’s ZORNS LEMMA (1970). The films, curated by Esperanza Collado, were paired together as seminal examples of structuralist/materialist cinema and, like Morata’s programme, were positioned as relevant precedents to new media art practices. I’ll be forced to grapple with Snow’s work in words when I get around to my Lucca report, so I think I’ll save my thoughts on WAVELENGTH till then. As for ZORNS LEMMA, it (kind of literally) speaks for itself, and if you can’t wait for a print to come your way, you can watch it online here. With regards to both, Collado said it best in her introduction: before you watch them, “forget everything” you thought cinema was supposed to be.
The accomplishments of Darklight may have delayed me from feeling the usual disappointment with Irish culture that comes when returning from somewhere as imaginatively rich as Berlin—but the Galway Film Fleadh made sure it kicked in eventually. I’ve attended the Fleadh for some six years now, and while they have showcased and played host to some some excellent directors over the years (Kiarostami, Roeg, Sokurov being the three I remember most fondly), their programming seems to be getting increasingly bland. While not yet at the mediocre level of the Dublin—sorry, Jameson—Film Festival (which just takes a range of new films, charges 10 euro and screens them in the same multiplex where many of them will end up playing on general release anyway), its programme this year was completely absent of the kind of curatorial imagination that made Darklight, or most of the events I attended in Berlin, so exciting.
The festival is, however, the industry one in Irish terms, and is always fascinating (if not exactly pleasant) as a litmus test in that sense. The three big things getting talked about this year: the astonishing and growing success of ONCE (2006, pictured above) in the States, the astonishing quality of Lenny Abrahamson’s new film GARAGE (2007), and, to a lesser extent, the astonishing amount of Irish films in the programme that weren’t bankrolled by the Irish Film Board.
A large portion of this year’s “Real Deal” seminar on film financing was dedicated to trying to work out what made ONCE work, and while lots of interesting points were made (one panellist’s concept of marketability—how easy a film is to market—and playability—how well a film plays to an audience—as the two primary, and often contradictory, factors in selling films was very smart, if a little scary), the consensus seemed to be, essentially, hard work + luck = ONCE; hard work + bad luck = everything else. It also doesn’t hurt that, like everybody’s favourite Irish short film, ONCE is also a very exact and hard-to-contrive mix of sincerity and familiarity, edginess and safety that seems to be the secret recipe for indie cinema success.
As for GARAGE, if it lacks that same balance, it’s no worse for it. Probably the first really mature Irish entry into the “cinema of small things” (in the sense I used the phrase when I wrote about Tom Noonan’s work), Abrahamson’s direction, O’Halloran’s script and Pat Shortt’s surprisingly understated performance manage to squeeze all the comedy and all the drama needed out of the tiniest things: a simple phrase, the way Shortt makes a sandwich or fixes a pipe or the way a thought flickers across his face. In these stakes, Abrahamson may not be a Tati or Noonan—at least not yet—but in the context of Irish cinema this is still something remarkable. Its depiction of rural Ireland as disconnected, emotionally stifling and expressively inert is all the more damning for not being remotely didactic or rhetorical, but merely the implicit effect of the accumulation of details.
As for all these new IFB-independent Irish features, they were mostly bunched into a one-day program entitled “Wild Cards”, which, I confess, I completely missed. So, whether this is our Mumblecore (Wafflecore?) or just more entries in the well-documented Irish tradition of country lads making action movies in their dad’s field, is still up for discussion. Judging from the brochure synopses, and the tandem piece on these guys in Film Ireland, I think it could go either way.
