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La poétique sonore de Sergueï Loznitsa

Article
27.11.2024
FR

Le sonore participe grandement à la dimension poétique de l’œuvre de Loznitsa. Sa rupture avec les pratiques instituées est sans appel. Il n’y aura ni musique, ni voix off – ce qui dans le monde du cinéma documentaire est signe d’une volonté rare. Cette approche du son fait ainsi toute la différence avec la très grande majorité des films documentaires existants. Une telle volonté met à l’arrêt toute idée de commentaire (musical ou verbal) induisant ainsi un tout autre son cinématographique. Car le cinéma sonne : Godard ne sonne pas comme Tati, qui ne sonne pas comme Bresson, Melville ou Loznitsa.

Passage: Herman Asselberghs

Passage
20.11.2024
NL FR EN

For Duras, the cinema seems the ideal place to show, to experience, to face, to keep facing existential solitude: “It’s perhaps there, in the movie theater, that this spectator finds his sole solitude and this solitude consists of turning away from himself.”

Grotesque Moments

Ulrike Ottinger in Conversation with Gerald A. Matt and Verena Konrad

Conversation
27.11.2024
EN DE

For me, the beautiful and the grotesque are inseparably linked. That is why I like to juxtapose or combine them in an image. For only this can make it clear, as Karl Rosenkranz wrote, that beauty arises from the ugly as the result of a process that removes all flaws from the everyday. Beauty is primarily an ideal, then an image in art, and sometimes it occurs in reality, because we look for it and find it.

A Point of View

Babette Mangolte’s The Camera: Je or La Camera: I (1977)

Article
13.11.2024
EN

On a warm Sunday last September, at New York City’s Metrograph Theater, Babette Mangolte introduced her 1977 film, The Camera: Je or La Camera: I, noting that although she had once felt the film explored imaging translation, she no longer felt this way. This curious manoeuvre: drawing attention to a once-held, now released, conviction, would be emblematic of the film to follow. As the theatre darkened, we the audience puzzled over what might have shifted Mangolte’s perspective, and she re-joined us to view her film – a masterclass dissection of subjectivity and photography.

Banshun [Late Spring] (Yasujirō Ozu, 1949)
Prisma #56

13.11.2024
EN

As many have observed, Ozu is a filmmaker of the present, with elements of the past or future relegated off-screen. Time seems absent in his films precisely due to its omnipresence, like the serene still life of the transition shots that evoke sadness, making utmost happiness resemble the utmost sorrow. This is Ozu’s melancholy, the hour when things linger, captured in one of the most recurring phrases: “That can’t be helped.”

Breaktime

Article
06.11.2024
FR EN

Breaktime is indeed about a passion, with the ball as cross and delight. Little matter its object: no object is absurd when the passion is true. As with all passions, the thing which saves you is also your undoing. The boy has been brought low, punished, beaten, and winds up going astray because of his ball (he has broken a school window), but it’s thanks to another ball (belonging to the group of children whose football game blocks the street he needs to cross) that he manages to get past the obstacle. The ball is his key to the world; it’s also his cross.

A Small Miracle

Faraz Fesharaki on Was hast du gestern geträumt, Parajanov? (2024)

Conversation
09.10.2024
EN

I manipulated the footage so much during editing that the boundaries between reality and fiction blurred. But even then, I don’t think it’s unreal, because what is real anyway? Even when you observe reality, you’re seeing it from a specific angle, editing it in your mind. That’s what I learned in the editing room – how different angles and edits can create entirely different versions of the same family.

February 26, 2024

Right Now, Wrong Then (Hong Sang-soo, 2015)

Op een dag een film
23.10.2024
NL EN

After an hour, the screen turned black. While the students started to stand up (relieved?), the title suddenly reappeared on the screen and the film seemed to start again. I got confused looks. Is the film looping? What I deliberately didn’t tell was that Right Now, Wrong Then consists of two parts, the second part repeating the first with some subtle and less subtle differences. Everyone got back into their chairs, except for one student, for whom, apparently, the second hour was too much. He had seen enough. While he left the classroom, I thought to myself that he hadn’t seen anything yet.

ISSUE
16.10.2024
Tussen hoofd en handen Entre tête et mains EN
Between Head and Hands

Johan van der Keuken (1938-2001) was a Dutch filmmaker and photographer. At the age of seventeen, he already made a name for himself with Wij zijn 17 (1955), a photo book of portraits of peers. A year later, he entered the Paris film school IDHEC, where he discovered a growing passion for filmmaking. As a filmmaker, he broke through with experimental documentaries such as Blind kind (1964) and the North-South trilogy (Dagboek, Het witte kasteel, en De nieuwe ijstijd, 1972-1974) in which he depicted increasing global inequality. He made more than fifty films.

Van der Keuken was also a gifted writer on cinema, an activity through which he sought to delineate his practice as a filmmaker. “For myself, writing was necessary at times, because something lived inside of me, floated before my eyes, that I wanted to grasp. With hermetic formulas or intuitive stammering, speculative ebullitions or harsh prescriptions for the world.” This collection of texts by Johan van der Keuken offers a chance to (re)discover him not only as a filmmaker but also as one of the most original writers on cinema.

Henry Moore’s Montage

Article
16.10.2024
NL FR EN

The more progress you make as a filmmaker, the more you view your work as a force, be it perhaps a modest one, in the social struggle. One of the repercussions is then that the free, autonomous image often must be subordinated to the image as the bearer of meanings. I have the feeling that, in covering precisely this ground, the art of montage has enriched its possibilities. First it dissociated itself from meaning and concept and became collage. By way of an acknowledgement of the limitations that our society (and perhaps every society) imposes upon us, it returned to the formulation of concepts. But in the process, it became a kind of montage that also incorporates the collage and exhibits a constant interchange between freedom and collective necessity. Dialectics that are left wing in their consequences but that “preserve the level of surprise.”

Méandres Meanders Meanders
NEWS
17.10.2024
EN

On the occasion of Seeing, Looking, Filming, the Johan van der Keuken retrospective presented by Sabzian and CINEMATEK, Sabzian launches a new print publication. The publication contains Van der Keuken’s original French text ‘Méandres,’ along with translations in Dutch and English.

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