Still on the ashes of a century that was of politics and of the cinema, how can we address today the relationships between these two fields? Starting by evoking seminal gestures of an era when the terms of that dichotomy had already been radically questioned (the turn from the sixties to the seventies), we will then move towards recent films that may help us think about the time elapsed and the opening of new cycles.
On the one hand, films that reflect the agony of an age – politics after the 20th Century politics, politics after politics. On the other hand, film explorations of territories that bear a strong imprint from memories, or ruins, of that previous time. On the other still, new gestures of political accusation that, in a very rare combination nowadays, also unfold as a reflection on the use of image.
Some possible clues in a program not aiming at systematization; it is rather built on partial questions, titles that may open cracks on the remaining clichés. Now and ever: what is a political image?
“A polemical and ideological essay on the events of the last ten years. These are documents taken from filmed newspapers and short films and assembled to follow a chronological-ideal line, whose meaning is an act of indignation against the unreality of the bourgeois world and its consequential historical irresponsibility. To document the presence of a world that, unlike the bourgeois world, is deeply aware of reality. Reality, in other words, a true love for tradition that only revolution can deliver”.” – Pier Paolo Pasolini
A masterpiece of Brazil’s Cinema Novo (New Cinema) movement, and the most influential film by Glauber Rocha (1938-1981), Terra em Transe is an intense, operatic spectacle that nevertheless conveys a true sense of the violence and irrationality that characterize electoral politics in a country scarred by underdevelopment. “Although the style is irregular you will see that the camera is always positioned as in a documentary”, Rocha said. The protagonist is a jounalist-poet who abandons his elite milieu for radical politics, only to become as disenchanted with his new comrades as he was with the cowardice of the intellectual class.
In J., Eduardo Escorel denounces the fragility of the human rights protection network from the personal account of the community leader of Kelson Favela in Rio, who denounced the criminal action of the local militias.
The life story of Genivaldo, a local farmer of the semi-dry region of Alagoas. A secular member of the Catholic Church, he was once the leader of the No Land Movement and a candidate for Mayor in his home town. Today he is faithful to his vocation as a political activist, away from the church, movements and political parties.
On the mythical Trans-Siberian train, in the third class carriage, you can hear all kinds of stories. People of various nationalities join the locals, workers, soldiers, students… all sharing the same time and the same space… and throughout the journey, sharing stories about their lives. The film is about one such story, among other possible stories. Two men travel on the same train, a Russian soldier and a Chechen man, with his family, returning from the motherland. They share a bond they don’t know about: Chechnya. A war for independence, for a territory that Russia will not relinquish, turns all Chechens into soldiers from birth.
Russia, 2007, exactly one year before the next presidential elections. The opposition is determined to act and take power. The two central figures, Anatoly and Andrei, are veteran revolutionaries. They were members of a political organization that was banned for more than ten years. The politics, however, serve only as a backdrop to the main action, providing the environment in which the protagonists exists. This is a story of pride, betrayal, and the beginning of a new life.
Fragments of spaces and times, remnants of eras and places where only memories and ghosts dwell. Traces of things that time, the elements, nature, and human action itself have modified and change. With time everything ceases to be, eventually becoming something else. Places that no longer make sense, are no longer necessary, no longer fashionable. Places that are forgotten, obsolete, inhospitable, empty. The point here is not to explain why they were created and existed, nor the reasons why they were abandoned or transformed. Only an idea, perhaps poetic, is promoted about something that was part of the (hi)story of this country.
Lee Anne Schmitt’s remarkable exploration of California’s landscape and past uses 16mm film to document the history of one-time boom towns built and abandoned by the industries that necessitated their creation. Sold as a limitless land, expansive with free opportunity, California was actually, from its onset, fissured by the interwoven needs of private and public interests. Schmitt’s associative film proceeds loosely through time, as the great industries of the early 20th century (mining, lumber, oil) give way to the military, eventually leading to multinational corporations, and the use of small towns as satelites for growing urban metropolises. Schmitt has depicted the ideology of progress and expansion, and the tangible sense of the haunted loss of American promise. The idea of a ‘company town’, Schmitt shows, has developed and changed over time, but at heart their circumstances remain the same; these are service settlements laid waste as a result of economic changes; they are, and will always be, almost exclusively swept into the trash bin of history.
A single shot, the description of a given moment, a landscape to aprehend in a single gesture, the memory of a fleeting moment, the time that it takes Ella Fitzgerald do sing ‘All My Life’.
“Using exciting juxtapositions of shade and movement, this silent and surreally poetic film examines subtle changes of light and landscape in New York. Hutton imposes on this film the aesthetics of still photography and uses as a structural device the duration of perception of the movements and illuminations.” (Bill Mortiz)
Depardon reflects about the impossibility to film and grasp the essence of a city through film. He shot four minutes everyday for two months.
A study of a boxer in ritual, ceremonious training. The act of training comes to symbolize the revolution a single person can make of his life and an attempt to transform the conditions of those around him; the boxer is a self professed former delinquent who founded a gym for his community’s youth.
The final film in the series is the most unique in form and content. Dedicated to (and heavily influenced in tone by the death of) the filmmaker’s father, this moody urban piece surveys an expressionistc New York City at dusk and night. At the film’s center is aged artist-musician Marion Brown whose proud, fatigued monologue fuses with haunting imagery of an alienating landscape.
“A photograph is a souvenir, a memory. Film is always now”, says Van der Keuken. In a small, depopulated village of the Aude province of France ,an elderly couple confides to the vacationer’s camera their memories of the past: war, illness, death… The film is put together as a collection of autonomous images that, once combined, make up Van der Keuken’s mental universe: Family happiness, fragments of some of his earlier films, two poems by the great contemporary poets Remco Campert and Lucebert, a portrait of the director’s grandfather, who taught him photography at the age of twelve…
Made while he was shooting Akerman’s From the Other Side, Fenz offers a vision of the US – Mexico border as a kinetic and disorienting fault line, an abstract force field suspended between the two nations.
A cine-poem of languid beauty with powerful observations of Cuban life captured in active street scenes and intimate portraiture. Shot in Central and Old Havanas, without parade or polemics, Fenz finds revolution in the tenacious stealth of a populace trapped by a proud past, in flux towards an unkown future.
Inspired by a meeting with Brazilian architecht Oscar Niemeyer, Fenz’s vision of a favela neighbourhood in Rocinha, Latin America’s largest permanent shanty town, is a methaphor for revolution abandoned. Frequent technical problems in-camera remain as chosen moments wherein this invisible community ‘comes to light’ in brilliant wash-outs and fade-ins, illuminating the restless energy of residents in unnervingly improvised living spaces.
History and its relationship to the present are contemplated through everyday events interwined with fragments of Mexican tradition.
“TV newscast discard 1965, reprinted as found (maybe in a Canal St. bin, I forget) with exception of boosting volume in second half. A lot of film is perfect left alone, perfectly revealing in its un- or semi-conscious form. I wish more stuff was available in its raw state, as primary source material for anyone to consider, and to leave for others in just that way, the evidence uncontaminated by compulsive proprietary misapplied artistry, ‘editing’ the purposeful ‘pointing things out’ that cuts a road straight and narrow through the cine-jungle, we barrel through thinking we’re going somewhere and miss it all. For the straight scoop we need the whole schoop, or no less than the clues entire and without rearrangement. Or, for a Museum of Found Footage, or cabel channel, library, a shit-museum of telling discards accessible to all talented viewers/auditors. A wilderness haven salvaged from Entertainment.” (Ken Jacobs)
A film and music collaboration that creates a sensorial testimony of the democratic ideal through the exploration of the distinct relationship between sound and image, using iconographic American imagery, graphic abstraction and a powerful piece of music by jazz inovator Wadada Leo Smith.
After a December filled with riots all over Greece, we spent 4 days of the second week of 2009 in Athens, trying to find what was denied to us by the media. Something other than street clashes, broken storefronts or burned-out cars. We met politicized students, committed teachers, courageous trade unionists, precarious ‘at the seams’ and angry journalists. Lefteria – liberdade is the outcome of the encounters from those days, and its screening in several contexts has motivated long discussions.
A man snakes through the crowd, appears out of nowhere, searching the trails of the void left by the riots. We are on the penultimate day of the clashes against the 2007 G8 meeting, and Cobra, from blockade to blockade, reaches the end of the road of revolt. When image phobia is real, the revolution is not filmed…
Paris, the open city. Vertigo of celebrations. Ruins. Winds. Tides. Young Iraqi, Afghani, Iranian immigrants wander the streets, among the soup kitchens and the fields of fortune. As they leave, they call into question the order of things and bourgeois society. An emancipation movement emerges, deeply melancholic, elegiac; redefining the concept of revolution for a new concept of History.
Anger in the heart. Straight through. Voices aloud. Police intervention. October 2006. A neighbourhood in Paris uprises spontaneously. And the echo of despair and anger cannot match the injustice that affects the inhabitants day after day. A historical gesture that refers to the most beautiful, most tenuous, most fragile popular struggles; Spartacus’ slaves, insurgents of the Commune, blacks and Latin Americans.
Rimbaud/Genet/Buñuel/Rossellini/Pasolini. Algerian teenagers survive in a hangar in Ceuta, waiting to move on to Europe. Yes. There is a certain idea of youth. Of youth as migration and of migrations as spring that emerge in each new year. Spring or the awakening of the sexes, Pasolini would say, the art of the encounter and of the wandering heart, and that reminds Europe and the established order of what they are: old men (posture of seclusion. Self-convergence. Fear). They will never escape them!
In Sissako’s second film, two lovers struggle to end their impossible affair during one last October night together in Moscow. Shot entirely in Moscow and Paris, October blends a strongly contemporary feel with nostalgia.
Both a documentary and a road movie, detailing the director’s quest to find Baribanga, an old Angolan friend he once knew in Russia. Sissako wends his way through Angola, with only an old photograph to help him. He stops along the way to ask peope if they’ve seen his friend and in doing so he creates a portrait of the former Portuguese colony, a State shredded by decades of civil conflict in the aftermath of independence.
The first images from an ongoing film about migration policies in Europe and social mobilizations. The first fragments on the situation of migrant people in Calais.
I. Niggerwood (Je brûle comme il faut) Calais, desolate town. ‘Everybody knows!’ Whiteness of a snow blanket that covers the city. Black and tutelary shadows, crosses and Beffroi that dominate it. Scarlet fires that surround and burn it. Figures and faces of people coming from far away. Outcasts. Variation on calcined and hellish political landscapes: the black-bodies. II. Ballad for a child (On ne te tueras pas plus que si tu étais cadavre) Calais, desolate town. ‘Everybody knows!’ Evocation: in a small wood, the ‘jungle’, a man who comes from far away, from a middle east at war, is murdered. It was in December 2008. And it is to a whole and political world that he will surrender his soul. Revolution: a man from afar goes by. And his words, his traces and that of him that survives, like a song, come from further away. From the abysses, from oblivion, from the sea and the deserts, from the infinite edges. They operate, in minority, a critical stasis of mythical and major realities: bare life, a state of exception… ‘Everybody knows!’ A man from afar goes by, like a new Orpheus, political, black and revolted. An impossible man that nothing and no one can ever stop again… III. Je me suis armé contre la justice (Burn ! Burn ! Burn !) (Writing of the summary in process.) IV. Le livre des damnés (La vie française, le sentier de l’honneur!) Like a circle of hell. Variation on betrayal and denial, the renegade’s curpidela as a medal, ‘pension funds’ as a future, from the book ‘Lettres à ceux qui sont pannés du col Mao au Rotary’ and Guy Hocquenghem (We will add “…et à la cour Barkozy…”), and from films by Lionel Soukaz and from or with Guy Hocquenghem.
Audio-visual notes for a proposed film that would never be made. It skillfully combines three different trypes of filmic material. (1) Documentary footage shot in Tanzania, with Pasolini’s voice-over either commenting upon the images in an ethnographic mode or explaining his intention to adapt Aeschylus’ Orestes into a contemporary African setting. These two themes blend in the search for faces and places that would fit his purpose. (2) An interview with African students at the University of Rome. Pasolini sounds them out on the perticence of the comparison he established between the institution of Greek democracy in Athens and the newly acquired independence of many African states. (3) A 12-minute jazz session with Gato Barbieri, in which the musicians perform Cassandra’s prophetic dream, accompanying the singers Yvonne Murray and Archie Savage.
A court is in session in a small village in Africa, complete with bewigged judges and serious bailiffs high-stepping over goats and squealing kids, but it’s no ordinary defendant and plaintiff in this well-spun allegory. Here, the African society is the accuser, and the accused are none other than the World Bank and other international institutions, put on trial for countless crimes and for funding exploitation and plundering of the world. Prosecutors and witnesses (played by well-known artists and intellectuals) offer devastating critiques of the true effects of development packages and ‘global economy’, while defense attorneys adjust their wigs and shift blame. Meanwhile, between rhetorical speeches and heated debates, life goes on in the courtyard, as Sissako cleverly ramps up his staged, Brechtian allegory with the constant buzz of African reality.
Session presented by the Association Os Filhos de Lumière, including the screening of films made by students from Escola Secundária de Serpa; with Teresa Garcia and Pierre-Marie Goulet.
“Two teenagers, too young to know how to use a rifle, roam the swamps in search of game. They get angry at each other, they go separate ways, and one of them gets caught in the mud. Alerted by the screams of the latter, the other sets off in search of help, which, in the midst of great confusion, eventually comes.” (François Ramase)
Abderrahmane Sissako is a Mauritian-born film director and producer known for films which explore globalization and displacement. He studied cinema at the Federal State Film Institute in Moscow and in the 1990s settled in France. His first feature-length film, Waiting for Happiness (2002) won a FIPRESCI Prize at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival. His features Bamako (2006) and Timbuktu (2014) were widely acclaimed, with the latter selected to compete for the Palme d’Or and nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
Aliona Polunina was born in Russia in 1977. Before making documentaries she studied painting, and worked as a copy-editor at lifestyle and fashion magazines. In 2002 she won an educational grant and enrolled in the higher course for script writers and producers, in the non-fiction film department. She graduated in directing and scriptwriting in Moscow in 2004.
He was born in São Paulo in 1945. A historic name in Brazilian cinema, Eduardo has worked as a director, editor, producer, screenwriter, teacher and film critic. He has directed, among others, Lição de Amor (1975), Ato de Violência (1980), Chico Antônio – O Herói com Caráter (1983) and Imagens do Estado Novo 1937-45 (2016). As an editor, he has worked on films such as Terra em Transe (1966), by Glauber Rocha, Macunaíma (1969), by Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, São Bernardo (1972), by Leon Hirszman, Cabra Marcado para Morrer (1984), by Eduardo Coutinho, and Santiago (2007), by João Moreira Salles. He published Adivinhadores de Água – Pensando no Cinema Brasileiro and collaborates with the magazine Piauí, writing a weekly column on the publication’s website.
Lee Anne Schmitt is a Los Angeles-based artist and filmmaker interested in political thought, personal experience and the land. Much of her work involves making 16mm films set in landscapes, objects and the traces of political systems left on them, considering the everyday elements of American life.
Manuel Mozos was born in Lisbon in 1959. He graduated in Cinema in 1984 from the former National Conservatory (now Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema). He has worked as an editor, screenwriter and assistant director with numerous Portuguese directors. He collaborates regularly with publications, schools, institutes, universities, cultural and film associations, film clubs and festivals. Since then, he has directed more than twenty films, including fiction and documentaries, shorts and features.
Mónica Batista, (born 1984), is an artist and experimental filmmaker based in Porto, Portugal. She studied Fine Arts-Painting and has dedicated herself to experimental and documentary filmmaking, using mainly analog formats such as Super8, 16mm and 35mm, using video and photography as subject matter.
Robert Fenz (1969, Ann Arbor, Michigan) is one of the most singular and committed filmmakers breathing new life to avant-garde film traditions today. Fenz’s films, mostly shot in black and white 16mm, have a rare energy and restless beauty that recalls both the jazz-inspired imagery of New York School photographers such as Roy DeCarava, but also the landscape films of one of Fenz’s former teachers, Peter Hutton, and the documentary work of Johan van der Keuken and Chantal Akerman, some of whose recent film works have actually been shot by Fenz himself. His films are personal and poetic portraits of people and places he encountered during his many travels in countries such as in Cuba, Mexico, Brazil and India. He passed away in 2020.
Sylvain George was born in Lyon, France. He holds degrees in philosophy, law and political sciences and cinema (EHESS, Sorbonne). Since 2006, he has made documentary films on the themes of immigration and social movements.
Porto, 1978. He graduated in Cine-Video from ESAP, took part in the Varan workshops at the Gulbenkian Program for Creativity and Artistic Creation, attended the Jean Rouch Seminar “Anthropologie et Cinema” at the Cinemateca Francesa and completed his master’s degree in documentary cinema at ESMAE-IPP.
His main activity is documentary filmmaking, and she has made intervention and political reflection films, as well as autobiographical and experimental works. He has also made several video installations.