In addition to highlighting retrospectives and festivals, Sabzian selects and contextualises three to four films or events in Belgium and its surroundings every week.En plus de mettre en lumière des rétrospectives et des festivals, Sabzian sélectionne et contextualise chaque semaine trois à quatre films ou événements en Belgique et dans les environs.Naast het belichten van retrospectieven en festivals, selecteert en contextualiseert Sabzian elke week drie tot vier films of evenementen in België en omstreken.
Following the demolition of the Berlin Wall, Chantal Akerman captures the reality and mutation of former Soviet territories, shot from summer through to winter in a series of travelling shots or with a static camera.
EN
“Chantal Akerman’s film D’Est [From the East], made in 1992 and early 1993, carries a heightened self-consciousness about the circumstances of [its] weighty historical moment. Shot mainly in Poland and Russia in the year and a half following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it discloses a world in suspension, on the edge of an undetermined future, yet still weighed down by long-standing patterns and habits. Using very long takes, it is an extended portrayal of certain textures of everyday life, sometimes suggesting a Sartrean seriality. In her essay on D’Est, Akerman famously declared that she felt the need to make the film ‘while there’s still time’ (« tant qu’il en est encore temps »). In one sense, she meant that she had to finish the project before it was too late, before cultural and economic forces transformed the subject of her work into something different, even unrecognizable. But, given the choices she made of what to record, ‘while there’s still time’ is also a way of saying: while there is still a world of time-in-common, a world sustained by a collective inhabiting and sharing of time and its rhythms, in the older sense of the word ‘quotidian.’”
“D’Est (1993), een verslag van een reis die Akerman ondernam naar Oost-Europa. Bevreemdende beelden van wachtende mensen, tijdens de herfst en de winter gefilmd in Duitsland, Polen en Rusland. Nu eens samen, zij het op een afgemeten afstand van elkaar, meestal alleen. Wachtend bij een telefooncabine, een lift, wachtend op iets… We zien stationshallen, keukens, woonkamers, waar men in afwachting piano speelt, eten bereidt, koffie drinkt, een sigaret rookt.”
“Zonder te gevoelig te doen zal ik zeggen dat er nog gezichten zijn die zich geven en bij momenten het gevoel van verlies doen vergeten, mensen op de rand van de afgrond die je van tijd tot tijd aangrijpen terwijl je het Oostblok doorkruist zoals ik net heb gedaan.
Je moet altijd schrijven wanneer je een film wil maken, terwijl je niets weet van de film die je wil maken.
Nochtans weet je er al alles van, maar zelfs dat weet je niet, gelukkig wellicht.
Het is enkel in confrontatie met het maken dat het zich zal openbaren. Op de tast, in het gestamel, de blinde en wankele twijfel.
Soms, met een heldere vanzelfsprekendheid.
En het is beetje bij beetje dat je beseft dat het altijd hetzelfde is dat zich openbaart, een beetje zoals de oerscène.
En de oerscène voor mij is – hoewel ik me ertegen verzet en ik er uiteindelijk razend van word – ik moet me overgeven aan de vanzelfsprekendheid, ver achter of altijd voorop: de oude beelden, nauwelijks versluierd door andere meer heldere en zelfs stralende beelden.”
“Alle films van Akerman gaan over tussenruimtes, de ruimte tussen leven en dood, openbaar en particulier, een geschiedenis die ophield te bestaan en een geschiedenis die zich nog niet heeft aangediend, die te laat is en op zich laat wachten, de ruimte tussen twee landen. Daarom zijn deuren en ramen zo belangrijk in haar films, als verbinding tussen twee ruimtes, maar ook als een kleine opening in de muur die twee ruimtes van elkaar scheidt. Het gaat steeds om een geschiedenis die ogenschijnlijk geëxorciseerd, maar nog overal voelbaar is.”
“Tussen haar fictiefilms en de afgewezen projecten door maakte ze schitterende documentaires met een heel kleine crew: D’est (1993), Sud (1999), De l’autre côté (2002). Ze ging te werk als een verkenner van het landschap – in Rusland, het zuiden van de VS en aan de Mexicaanse grens – en van de mensen die erin leven. Ze keek en bleef kijken met veel geduld. Ze vertelde me ooit dat ze als kind urenlang mensen kon observeren: een arbeider, een timmerman of een straatveger die gewoon zijn werk doet.”
“Het is allemaal heel intuïtief begonnen. Een dame uit een museum in Boston vroeg me of ik een installatie wou maken. Het was aan het begin van de jaren negentig, het begin van de opening naar Oost-Europa. Ik had al twintig jaar zin om daar een film over te maken. Ik wou eigenlijk tonen hoe de Slavische talen zich vermengen en evolueren. Achteraf klinkt dat vreemd, want er wordt amper gesproken in de film ‘D'Est' (1993), noch in de tentoonstelling, met uitzondering dan van die paar woorden op het vijfentwintigste scherm. Ondertussen kreeg ik hier wat geld om de film te maken. De kunst kon me op dat moment gestolen worden. Twee jaar later, toen de film af was, kreeg ik het bericht uit de VS dat ze geld hadden voor de installatie. Wat nu gedaan? Ik was bij mijn monteuse. En, ik weet niet waarom, maar ik nam drie schermen. Ik had de video's van de film en liet ze lopen op de schermen, maar niet synchroon. We hebben daar een hele tijd naar gekeken en plots zagen we dat die beelden begonnen te werken. Het was de tijd van de conceptuele kunst: eerst het idee en dan de handeling. Bij mij was het net omgekeerd: eerst doen en het idee volgt wel. De beelden werden aangereikt door het handelen. Ik heb absoluut niets met conceptuele kunst. Al doende vonden we acht combinaties van drie beelden. Zo ontstond dat idee van een bos van vierentwintig schermen. Het vijfentwintigste heeft me het meeste tijd gekost; het is bijna abstract en opgevat als een memoriaal. We noemden de installatie ‘D'Est, au bord de la fiction', maar ik weet niet meer hoe we daarop zijn gekomen.”
« Sans faire trop de sentiment, je dirai qu’il y a encore des visages qui se donnent et effacent par moments le sentiment de perte, de monde au bord du gouffre qui parfois vous étreint lorsque vous traversez l’Est comme je viens de le faire.
Faut toujours écrire, quand on veut faire un film, alors qu’on ne sait rien du film qu’on veut faire.
Pourtant on en sait tout déjà, mais même ça, on ne le sait pas, heureusement sans doute.
C’est seulement confronté au faire qu’il se révèlera. À tâtons, dans le bredouillement, l’hésitation aveugle et claudicante.
Parfois, dans un éclair d’évidence.
Et c’est petit à petit que l’on se rend compte que c’est toujours la même chose qui se révèle, un peu comme la scène primitive.
Et la scène primitive pour moi – bien que je m’en défende et que j’enrage à la fin –, je dois me rendre à l’évidence, c’est, loin derrière ou toujours devant, de vieilles images à peine recouvertes par d’autres plus lumineuses et même radieuses. »
« Quand elle allait tourner un documentaire, elle ne voulait pas expliquer ce qu’elle allait faire. Si elle expliquait, elle n’avait plus le désir. Elle voulait aller sur les lieux, et être une éponge plaque sensible. Elle ne voulait pas enfermer le film dans un projet, mais le laisser venir à elle, se laisser envahir par la matière. Si les images de Chantal sont si profondes et fortes, si elles dépassent ce qu’elles montrent, c’est parce qu’elles ne sont pas enfermées dans des intentions, mais qu’elles sont chargées de tous les questionnements, les obsessions qui l’habitaient. Cette façon de travailler, de découvrir en faisant, était encore plus forte quand on faisait des installations. À propos d’un projet d’installation, Chantal a écrit : « J’avais dit beaucoup de choses sur l’installation qui a suivi d’Est avant de la faire, et j’ai compris que, plus encore qu’un film, une installation pour moi ne se décrit pas à l’avance, elle naît petit à petit dans le travail lui-même. Aussi ici, je ne dirai rien, si ce n’est la nécessité de la fragmentation parce que celle-ci montre bien qu’on ne peut pas tout montrer d’un monde. » Pendant le montage de d’Est, on sentait que les longs travellings sur les visages des gens qui attendent, les images des gens qui marchent, renvoyaient à d’autres gens qui attendent ou qui marchent, à d’autres files, à d’autres histoires dans l’histoire, mais on n’en parlait pas. Ce n’est qu’un an plus tard, lorsque nous montions l’installation d’Est au bord de la fiction, que Chantal a mis des mots sur les échos de ces images en elle-même. Ces mots, c’est le texte du vingt-cinquième écran [...]. »
« En parlant D'Est elle dit « Il faut toujours écrire quand on veut faire un film. Même un film comme ça. » Et elle note des fragments, des remarques de carnet de voyage, des impressions. L'étonnant est que le film se reflète parfaitement dans ce qui n'était que notations fugaces. L'écriture révèle le vu, ou parfois même le pressent. Quand Godard lui reproche d'écrire plutôt que de prendre des photos; alors que précisément le film consistera à prendre des photos, elle répond qu'elle écrit ce qu'elle veut montrer, ce qu'elle a dans la tête. L'écriture est à l'origine du désir, un premier repérage. »
2Claire Atherton, « À propos de Chantal Akerman, » Cinéma du Réel website. Texte lu à la soirée d’hommage à Chantal Akerman à la Cinémathèque Française le 16 novembre 2015 par Claire Atherton, monteuse, qui a travaillé de nombreuses années avec Chantal Akerman.
A poetic essay film on the colonial gaze and the magic lantern. This early type of image projector was used in Belgian colonial propaganda, showcasing the good works of the Church, State and industry. Lantern projections were an effective way of selling the colonial project to a somewhat reluctant Belgian public. However fragile images made of glass may be, many thousands survived. Often lavishly hand colored, these tainted, horribly beautiful images helped shape the ways in which Europeans viewed, thought of, spoke about, and treated the colonial other. This tension between aesthetic experience and the reverberations of colonial ideology is central to the film. In composing an associative fabric of assemblages and collages, the film attempts to map the colonial gaze from a broken view, how it persists across time and shapes the way we view, think of, and speak about the past.
EN
“Broken View doesn’t shy away from the ambiguity and appeal of the hand-coloured photos which were used to impose the racist discourse of the Belgian colonial nightmare. Instead, it captures the diabolical essence of the latter, conveying its mind-numbing complexity, in an accumulation of quotations and overexposure of images and texts which turn it into a jam-packed and painful essay, as well as an aesthetically exhilarating film.”
“Both the essayistic montage and the collage, the poetics I turned to in this film, bring together elements that often have little to do with one another. They do this, as the writer Brian Dillon wrote about the essay form, ‘in such a way that the scandal or shock of their proximity arrives alongside a conviction that they have always belonged together’. So, these images must be accompanied by other images, brought into relation with other, maybe even seemingly unconnected images. These relationships are not comparisons or equations, but the threads of an unfinished fabric, a continuous work of de- and reassembly, a broader, perhaps speculative contextualization. Assemblages are formed in which the figures are brought into each other’s orbit, within a wider frame and into another timeline than those of the photographs they were taken out of, inserting them into new constellations, trying to find new rhythms. In doing so, I hope to make visible some of the brushstrokes with which they were originally made, the power relations these images texturized and helped (helplessly) to fabulate, the purposes they were to serve. The film is an essay, an atlas of sorts, or an album where fragments of images and language exchange their shortcomings, what words can show and what images can say.”
“Er zijn twee spanningsvelden waarrond ik de beelden componeer, assembleer, collages maak. Vele beelden zijn onmiskenbaar prachtig en met een grote toewijding gemaakt. Enerzijds is er dus de spanning tussen de esthetische ervaring die de beelden teweegbrengen en het bewustzijn van de koloniale ideologie die de beelden uitdragen. Anderzijds is er de spanning tussen de persoonlijke beleving en herinnering en het beeld dat in het gemeenschappelijke bewustzijn leeft van de kolonie, toen en nu. Er is enerzijds de schandalige schoonheid en het schandelijke geluk, niet minder gelukkig omdat het een schande is, niet minder schandelijk omdat het geluk is.”
In the north of France, a family lives in the woods, supported by the eldest son’s logging, despite his frequent, violent epileptic fits. The arrival of a stranger to help the logging sets off tremors that dislocate the delicate balance of family relationships.
EN
“The things that guide me are actually very concrete questions, how to film a hand, how to remain on that hand and then how at a certain moment to move to a face, and then I cut, and how do I return to that hand, and then back to the fade, and then back again, and that rhythm gives rise to something in me that allows me to move towards something I don’t really know, to get close to a space where there is an immense desire.”
“Instead of the heavy 35mm camera painfully held on the shoulder for Sombre, it’s with a small DV camera (and all that involves) that Grandrieux has shot Un Lac, with a freedom of mastered improvisation which is felt throughout the entire film […]. And thus the camera’s most directly sensitive recording capacity accompanies a will of great abstraction in the way that Grandrieux treats each of the components of the film, in the editing and the sound design, which is entirely constructed, as well as in the decision of lowering the level of light sensitivity, carefully respected from the shooting to the digital colourgrading and the blowup to 35mm. All of this seems to suggest that we are in front of a new way of negotiating the relation between the ‘two biggest trends in cinema, the design-tendency and the recording-tendency’. Serge Daney added ‘two ways of engaging the inhuman in the human’, explaining that it would be ‘in the middle, the ‘scene-tendency’ […] that the inhuman is kept at a distance’.”
Raymond Bellour
1Philippe Grandrieux interviewed by Anne Foti and Sylvain Lécuyer at the Premiere of Un Lac, 2008.
FR
« Je me laisse emporter, fasciné par ce qui ne cesse de transformer devant moi, par ce que je vois si mal et que je désire d’autant plus. Je fouille l'image, m’y enfonce et m’y perds. J’emmène les acteurs avec moi, vers ce que je ne sais plus. Je les guide par la main dans cette obscurité nouvelle, de sorte qu'à leur tour ils ne sachent plus où ils en sont, ce qu'ils font, ce qu'est la scène, ce que l'on tourne. Egaré dans cette nuit obscure où les impressions et les affects ne sont plus séparé, où l’intelligence, comme le recommandait Proust, cède le pas à la sensation, je ressens une sort d'exaltation, j’éprouve le sentiment puissant du film que se fait, malgré moi, au-delà de moi, l) où je ne pouvais pas le pense ni le vouloir, mais juste l’attendre. Alors je vais à nouveau vers eux, la lumière si faible m’aveugle, leurs souffles et au loin le fracas assourdi des avalanches m’enveloppent. J’avance dans mon sommeil. Mes pas chancelants de somnambule me conduisent plus profondément dans la matière du film, et mon cœur battant à l’unisson du sien, à l’unisson de tout ce qui m’entoure, de tout ce qui arrive, je ferme les yeux. Et c’est noir. Et tout continue encore. Tout m’envahit. Je filme. C’est le Réel que je filme. »
With little or no embellishment, filmmaker Marguerite Duras offers a simple, often wordless chronicle of a woman’s day. She and her friend are seen doing yard work, talking about their families and receiving the occasional visitor. The brightest spot in the day is when a washing machine salesman comes to call.
FR
« On a parlé de l’inquiétude que provoque le film sur le spectateur. Elle est sans aucun doute de même nature que celle qui découle de toute exploration – désintéressée – d’un lieu, d’un visage, d’un objet. Si vous entrez dans une maison pour aller y chercher une histoire, l’histoire pourra vous inquiéter sans doute, mais pas la maison par elle-même. Si vous entrez dans la maison pour rien, sans être prévenu de quoi que ce soit (comme vous êtes prévenus dans 98 % des films), la maison devient par elle-même et à elle seule, objet d’inquiétude, de fascination. Entrez par hasard n’importe où : n’importe où, c’est terrifiant. »
« Il y a plus de temps à vivre pour cette maison qu’il n'y en a derrière elle, parce que, maintenant, on répare les maisons. On répare les toitures. Elle durera beaucoup plus longtemps. Elle va encore durer des siècles. Et moi, je l’aurai habitée pendant un fragment de temps très bref. Mais, curieusement, ce n’est pas mon histoire que j’ai dite là, puisque je n’ai pas d’histoire. Puisque je suis un écrivain, mais je n’ai pas d’histoire à proprement parler. Je n’ai pas de moteur extérieur à moi. Il y en a très, très peu. À part la vie et la mort, celle de mes proches et de moi, je n’en vois pas. Donc, je ne me suis pas mise dans cette histoire, mais j’ai mis d’autres gens, inventés. »
« Les premiers films de Marguerite Duras étaient marqués par toutes les puissances de la maison, ou de l’ensemble parc-maison, peur et désir, parler et se taire, sortir et rentrer, créer l’événement et l’enfouir, etc. Marguerite Duras était un grand cinéaste de la maison, theme si important dans le cinéma, non seulement parce que les femmes « habitant » les maisons, en tous ces sens, mais parce que les « habitant » les femmes. »
A young woman is sent away from a convent as a novice because of her too excessive devotion to Jesus and too ascetic attitude. In her mystical search for spiritual solace, she eventually turns to Islam.
EN
“On a stylistic level, Dumont and Hadewijch can be termed ‘soulmates’ in the light of their attempts to articulate the inexpressible. Dumont’s unrelenting quest for approaching the inexpressible makes mysticism a guiding principle for his vision of cinema. It should be noted, however, that a director uses his medium differently from a writer and it is this difference that constitutes the leeway between poetic mysticism and a transcendental film style. Hadewijch injects her texts with abundant means – lyrical expressions full of passion, resulting into an ineffable union – to counter the sparseness of literature. Conversely, Dumont injects his cinema with sparse means – coldly framed images to withhold psychologically motivated expressions of emotions – as an antidote to cinema as an abundant means.”
“These days I am very interested in mysticism because it goes way beyond philosophy. Mysticism takes us to areas that are beyond questions of reason, beyond speech, and beyond our comprehension of the world. It takes us to an area that is very close to cinema, and I think that cinema is capable of exploring that area and expressing it. That’s why, necessarily, I am attracted to mysticism. At the same time, it’s a complex area. I’m not myself religious – I’m not a believer – but, I do believe in grace and the holy and the sacred. I’m interested in them as human values. I place The Bible alongside Shakespeare, for example; not as a religious work, but as a work of art. The Bible has the definite values of a work of art.”
1Peter Verstraten, “Mesmerized by Mysticism: The Transcendental Style of Bruno Dumont’s Hadewijch,” Journal of Dutch Literature 2, no. 2 (2011): 27-45.
A young ballet dancer is torn between the man she loves and her pursuit to become a prima ballerina.
Boris Lermontov: Why do you want to dance? Victoria Page: Why do you want to live? Boris Lermontov: Well I don’t know exactly why, but I must. Victoria Page: That’s my answer too.
“I saw The Red Shoes (1948) aged nine or ten. My father took me. Seeing it that first time was an overwhelming experience for me. My father, who worked in the garment district in New York, certainly wasn't an educated man but he did like films. For some reason, he took me to see The Red Shoes. I certainly don't think he was a ballet enthusiast. I believe that the film had picked up an audience here in America. Everyone was talking about it and so he wanted to see it. [...] The colour, the way the film was photographed by the great Jack Cardiff, stayed in my mind for years. The film would be shown every Christmas on American television in black and white, but it didn’t matter – we watched it. Even though it was in black and white on TV, we saw it in colour. We knew the colour. We still felt the passion – I used to call it brush-strokes – in the way Michael Powell used the camera in that film. Also, the ballet sequence itself was like an encyclopedia of the history of cinema. They used every possible means of expression, going back to the earliest of silent cinema.”
“At a time when ‘realism’ was the fetish of so many filmmakers and critics throughout the world, this was a bold gamble. It was the same gamble that Eisenstein had taken in his operatic Ivan the Terrible, that Ophüls would soon take in La ronde (also with Anton Walbrook), and that Kelly and Donen took in Singin’ in the Rain. None of these received their critical due when they first appeared. But the passage of time has shown them to be among the most powerful and evocative of all films. The Red Shoes belongs in their company: a parable about the demands of art, as well as a stunning demonstration of cinema’s claim to have united the traditional arts in a new synthesis.”
“Because I lived in the country during the war, I saw films for the first time in London circa 1945/1946 . . . I saw Nanook of the North and The River around this time and both left distinct images in my memory. But, in common with many other girls at the time and, indeed, ever since, I would choose The Red Shoes as my first formative film.”
Laura Mulvey
“Over the years, there have been several movies in which attempts have been made to capture the spirit and the beauty, the romance and the enchantment of the ballet. And, inevitably, in these pictures, ballets have been performed, a few times with charm and sincerity but more often - and unfortunately - without. However, there has never been a picture in which the ballet and its special, magic world have been so beautifully and dreamily presented as the new British film, The Red Shoes.
Here, in this unrestricted romance, which opened at the Bijou yesterday, is a visual and emotional comprehension of all the grace and rhythm and power of the ballet. Here is the color and the excitement, the strange intoxication of the dancer's life. And here is the rapture and the heartbreak which only the passionate and the devoted can know.”
“I think as a filmmaker, [The Red Shoes] speaks to anyone who is very devoted to an artistic pursuit, that you are drawn in into this addictive world and it takes you over. You become obsessed with it and it's very difficult on your personal life. So for me, it was the dilemma that Moira Shearer is in, that she's torn between the desire to be with her husband and also to be a great ballet dancer, is very relevant to me, personally. And also the portrayal of how artists work together to create a great work of art is beautiful laid down in the film. I don't think anyone has done it better, the way many people contribute and how one person has to sort of guide them and lead them, and something beautiful comes out of it. [...] Well Michael Powell always said: ‘All art is selfish, it has to be. It has to draw you in completely. You have to fully engage your very being in order to make good art.’ I think there is no question that art is a wonderful thing to commit yourself to but it's a little hard on the people you live with. [...] Making a film is like being in a small war. You're all fighting together, something beautiful laid down on film. You're often fighting the people who are funding it because they want you to change it and you think they are going to ruin it. You're constantly fighting and struggling together as a wonderful team. So it’s a great experience and we make livelong friendships in the way people do in war.”
“By now, reader, it can be no secret between you and me that The Red Shoes was another step, or was planned by me as another step, in my search for a perfect film, on other words for a ‘composed’ film.”
Paul, a quiet, ordely and solitary young man, works in a large New-York City bank. One evening, he meets a mysterious young woman, Marcy, who leads him into the bohemian neighbourhood on a strange and dangerous adventure…
EN
“How can a film about the night’s seduction become a film about the nightmare of the unknown? How can a film about relief become a film about anguish? After Hours is a movie (as Stern saw well) full of tiny, complicated patterns: networks of exchange, spirals of circulating objects, hallucinatory substitutions. It’s The Earrings of Madame de… (1953) gone berserk, off its leash. The simplest thing becomes a problem – a big problem – for Paul. Keys fall from the sky, multiply, and create more problems once they let him in somewhere. Push-buttons, coin slots, doorbells, toilet flushers trigger cascades of unstoppable stuff. Getting in and getting out of anything, anywhere, becomes nightmarish. The normally coded zones of social space, public or private, switch without warning: entrance ways lead to prisons; illicit havens become potential tombs.”
After killing his employer when said employer tries to cheat him out of his payment, a man becomes an outlaw and starts following a self-proclaimed saint.
EN
“Here’s my rifle to save the poor from starving”
Corisco
“What replaces the correlation of the political and the private is the coexistence, to the point of absurdity, of very different social stages. It is in this way that, in Glauber Rocha’s work, the myths of the people, prophetism and banditism, are the archaic obverse of capitalist violence, as if the people were turning and increasing against themselves the violence that they suffer from somewhere else out of a need for idolization (Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol, ‘Black God and White Devil’). Gaining awareness is disallowed either because it takes place in the air, as with the intellectual, or because it is compressed into a hollow, as with Antonio das Mortes, capable only of grasping the juxtaposition of two violences and the continuation of one by the other.”
“Brazil taught me to laugh. For me the comic is the height of intelligence. It is the Brazilians’ intelligence which makes them laugh. Of course I love the chanchadas [musical comedies, Trans.]. Of course I have replaced the ‘politique des auteurs’ by the ‘politics of friends’: Ah, how much I feel myself to be a friend of John Ford whom I have never met, and no doubt fortunately for me. Glauber Rocha would say to me: ‘My friendships are not psychological, they are epic.’ I find this statement fantastic.”
Anne-Marie Stretter, wife of a French diplomat, lives in 1930s India. She takes many lovers as systems of oppression decay around her.
“As savvy spectators of today, we need to remind ourselves of the strangeness of India Song in this regard – and how radical a gesture it must have been in 1975. This is a film in which the act of representing the past – recreating it, evoking and conjuring it, building it on screen – undergoes a massive process of dematerialisation. There are costumes and sets that more or less evoke that past, and music participating in the historical mood… but very little else.
Is the costume-drama flimsiness of India Song a matter of economy, production expedience? On the contrary, it was, from the outset, a fundamental aesthetic decision. The past is gone, cannot be represented, is lost in the mists of its re-mediation and narrativisation; personal experience can only be reconstructed accordingly, at the risk of what Bickerton calls an extreme (and, for her, crippling) ‘sense of otherness from the world’. This is the type of writing or art-making, from the cliff-edge of oblivion, deliberately riddled with absences and impossibilities, that is familiar from the work of Duras’ literary comrade, Maurice Blanchot.”
“The film opens at dusk. The sun exudes a mesmerizing orange glow before receding into the foggy night. We hear the crackling voice of a woman singing in an unknown language before two disembodied voices, servants perhaps, whisper stories about this raucous beggar woman who lives among the lepers. No one knows how she found her way to Calcutta, this woman who comes originally from Savannakhet, Laos, but here she is, “together/ she and the white woman/ during the same years.” Sound in the film is entirely non-diegetic, and loose strands of conversation from unidentified speakers both male and female, privileged and poor, come together like incantations joining two, unlike experiences and people in a shared stream of recollections. At such a remove from the image, speech plunges us into a heightened state of dissociation, yet stray observations about the smell, and sound of India and its colonized inhabitants ground these phantom characters in palpable sensations.”
“Tant qu’une image est vivante, tant qu’elle a de l’impact (idéologiquement dangereuse ou utile), tant qu’elle interpelle un public, tant qu’elle lui fait plaisir, cela signifie que fonctionne dans cette image, autour d’elle, derrière elle, quelque chose qui est du domaine de rénonciation (pouvoir + événement = « Voici »). Admirable à cet égard est le dernier film de M. Duras (India Song) qui nous donne à saisir (à entendre) d’où vient ce qui nous donne les images.”
“Dans le film India Song qu’annonce La Femme du Gange (1974), il y a déjà, toujours déjà la littérature de Marguerite Duras, un labyrinthe-gigogne qui s’ouvre avec un roman, Le Vice-Consul (1966), qui se poursuit avec la pièce de théâtre India Song (1973), qui s’entretient encore des échos mêlés de L’Amour (1972) comme du Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (1964). Avec la chambre noire du cinéma, le musique silencieuse de l’écriture peut enfin s’ouvrir à l’incantation des voix sans corps et à la chorégraphie ralentie des corps sans voix. La radicale séparation des plaques tectoniques de l’image et du son est plus qu’un décalage pour un démarquage. Plus qu’un décollement, c’est une profonde dislocation dont la modernité, alors partagée avec Jean-Luc Godard et Jean-Marie Straub et Danièle Huillet, arrache à la synchronisation, qui est une double capture de l’image et du son au service technique de la représentation mimétique, des puissances d’expression et d’autonomie nouvelles. L’éden cinéma est celui d’un grand refus, d’un souverain non à la reconstitution. Un non destituant même le régime dominant de la représentation.”
“In Café de Flore, sat with Duras and her friend Raúl Escari, I remember having asked, out of the blue, what it was that really made her laugh. Duras looked at me, smiled, finished off her cigarette and said: ‘Banana skins. People slipping and breaking their noses. I’m very classic.’”
3Serge Daney, "Un tombeau pour l’oeil (En marge de ‘L’Introduction à la musique d’accompagnement pour une scène de film d’Arnold Schoenberg’ de J.-M. Straub)," Cahiers du Cinéma 258-259 (July-August 1975).
Manon has been a defendant in the Tarnac case for ten years, accused with eight other people of participating in a terrorist undertaking while sabotaging high-speed lines in France. As their trial approaches, Audrey Ginestet takes her camera to join the group of women who helps Manon preparing her defense.
FR
« Une arrestation à son domicile, par 150 policiers cagoulés de la brigade antiterroriste. Quatre-vingt-seize heures de garde à vue. Deux semaines d’incarcération à Fleury-Mérogis. Un an sous contrôle judiciaire, avec signature hebdomadaire au commissariat de Limoges. Une interdiction de sortie du département de la Corrèze, et de voir les autres inculpés. Enfin, au bout du tunnel, et sans compter les jours, les nuits de peur et d’incertitude, trois semaines à 500 km de son domicile, de sa fille, de son foyer, pour assister à son procès. Voici quelques faits de la vie de Manon Glibert après sa mise en examen, le 11 novembre 2008, pour « association de malfaiteurs à visée terroriste et dégradation en réunion sur des lignes ferroviaires dans une perspective d’action terroriste ». Soit sa participation supposée à un acte de sabotage sur des caténaires de Haut-Clocher (Moselle), puis en 2009 sur un autre point de l’affaire dite « de Tarnac », du nom de la commune du plateau de Millevaches où Glibert a établi domicile dans une ferme en déréliction, le Goutailloux, et investi un commerce local, le Magasin général, pour le transformer en lieu de vie collective et de culture. »
« Relaxe est le premier long-métrage documentaire d’Audrey Ginestet, ingénieure du son, mixeuse, et également bassiste au sein du groupe Aquaserge. Devant la caméra, la principale protagoniste du film est Manon Glibert, qui joue de la clarinette dans le même groupe. Le film n’est pas un documentaire musical sur ce groupe, l’un des plus inventifs et exaltants de la scène française. Seule une séquence montre, incidemment, une séance de répétitions du groupe.
Le film évoque un tout autre sujet, aux implications lourdes et aux ramifications tortueuses : la préparation du procès du dit « groupe de Tarnac » (tenu en mars 2018), dont faisait donc partie Manon. Information pas si connue que ça, même en suivant aussi attentivement la scène musicale contemporaine que l’actualité.
Même si l’on ne voit qu’à peine Aquaserge dans le film, convoquer la figure du groupe n’est pas si incongru. La musique d’Aquaserge est faite d’une matière sonore hybride et joyeuse, un free-rock qui n’a pas peur des morceaux longs, aime les ruptures de rythme, passe de la stase planante aux à-coups bruitistes, tout en scandant des hymnes oulipiens et des mots d’ordre dédiés au plaisir et à l’amitié. Bref, Aquaserge est un groupe insaisissable, rétif à toute étiquette, remodelant sans cesse ses propres formats. Et de loin en loin, au-delà de l’affaire Tarnac, Relaxe procède de la même logique. C’est un film qui déjoue les étiquettes et nourrit son écriture de son propre processus de recherche. »
In June 1973 the coal miners at Brookside, Kentucky voted to join the United Mineworkers of America. When the Eastover Mining Company refused to grant the United Mineworkers union recognition, a strike began which was to last 13 long months. This documentary tries to situate the strike within the history of miners’ struggles in the Appalachians and within more recent efforts to democratize the union.
EN
“Harlan County, USA; that was my first ever film that I did on my own. I worked on other people’s films doing sound and editing, but this for me was the very first. I started doing the during the time of Miners for Democracy. Arnold Miller won the Miners for Democracy and his first promise was to ‘organize the unorganized.’ In the early ‘70s in Harlan County, Kentucky, which had always been a place where you live and you die by your gun, they also had ‘Bloody Harlan County’ where people had fought for the right to have a union and many people died. An incredible woman named Florence Reece wrote a song called ‘Which Side Are You On?’ and it pertains to almost every single struggle, whether it’s a labor struggle or something else. Sometimes the verses have been changed, but she wrote that song. She also sang it in the ‘70s in Harlan County. [sings] ‘They say in Harlan County, there are no neutrals there. You’ll either be a union man or a thug for J.H. Blair. Which side are you on? Which side are you on?’ That was the original.”
“Harlan County USA is a powerful documentary of a long and brave struggle. But it also shows the lack of theoretical foundations in the American labour movement. The underlying assumption seems to be that if the coal operators were simply more humane and recognised the workers’ “constitutional rights as American citizens’’ all would be well. There is no recognition that the American capitalist system may be at fault or that the mineWorkers of America have anything in common with other members of the working class. Their oppression is seen to flow from only one source - the mine owners and operators. The role of the state, and the church, indeed the whole system, is barely acknowledged.
This is all disturbing enough but in addition even latent feminism is absent at Brookside. The Harlan County women are shown as brave and forthright and it is fair to say that without their support the strike would have been lost. Their physical presence on picket lines, their arguments with judges and sheriffs, their arrests, their emotional support, and indeed their film, are all crucial. But these correct and courageous actions are almost entirely based on pure self-sacrificing principles. They have no independent demands and little awareness of their own particularly oppressed state as women.
The women may have won the strike at Harlan County hit both they and the United Mineworkers of America are in desperate need of political consciousness raising. Only then can past victories be firmly consolidated and future struggles more easily won.”
Influential feminist theorist and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha’s lyrical film essay commemorating the 40th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War draws inspiration from ancient legend and from water as a force evoked in every aspect of Vietnamese culture. Images of contemporary life unfold as a dialogue between land and water. Fragments of text and song evoke the echoes and traces of a trauma of international proportions.
EN
Erika Balsom: You’re well known as a documentary filmmaker and have written an influential critique of the genre; you have even said that there is no such thing as documentary. Could you elaborate?
Trinh T. Minh-ha: I don’t think of my films in terms of categories – documentary, fiction, film art, educational or experimental – but rather as fluid, interacting movements. The first is to let the world come to us through an outside-in movement – this is what some call ‘documentary’. The other is to reach out to the world from the inside out, which is what some call ‘fiction’. But these categories always overlap. I wrote ‘there is no such thing as documentary’ because it’s illusory to take the real and reality for granted and to think that a neutral language exists, even though we often strive for such neutrality in our scholarly work. To use an image is to enter fiction.
Trinh T. Minh-ha in conversation with Erika Balsom1
“There is a scene in Trinh T. Minh-ha’s provocative portrait of postwar Vietnam in Forgetting Vietnam (2015) that names a genre of dysphoric subjectivity under global capital. In an underexposed room backlit by the noon sun, the camera captures a fleeting moment of diverted attention. A figure, whose mahogany robes and shaved head mark his indelible difference as a nonsecular, ethnic subject, is seen sitting on a stool against a chipped plaster wall, monitoring a swaying wooden mallet. Though tasked to discipline the mallet into properly timed strikes against a temple gong for the tourists, his gaze, like the mallet, forgets the trajectory to which he is bound and begins to wander. At times, the figure steals a momentary glance at the surveilling regard of the camera, closing the distance between spectator and subject that sustains the voyeuristic relationship between a body marked by difference and its other. While the viewer is immersed in this mundane snapshot of fleeting distraction, a question interrupts the bottom right corner of the screen, evaporating out of sight as quickly as it came: ‘getting bored?’
Though the address remains ambivalent – to the figure in frame (bored of your task?), the audience in the theater (bored of this scene?), or the abstract voyeur of Vietnam (bored of these images?) – the question nonetheless interpellates a genre that links subjects across the time and space of global capital, especially in sites and populations zoned as disposable reservoirs of extractable labor.”
News from Home consists of long takes of locations in New York City, set to Akerman’s voice-over as she reads letters her mother sent her between 1971 and 1973, when the director lived in the city.
EN
Dear child,
l received your letter and hope you will write often. l hope you won’t stay away too long and that you’ve found a job by now. If you’re doing well, we’re happy. Even though we do miss you. When will you be back? Everything is fine here, but Sylviane is home with the flu. My blood pressure is low. l’m on medication for it. Today is my birthday. l feel sad. lt’s quiet at the shop. Tonight we’re going out to dinner with friends. That’s all. Your birthday is coming up. l wish you all the best. Write to me soon about your work, about New York, about everything. Lots of love from the three of us.
Your loving mother
“Tot ik News from Home zag en Les rendez-vous d’Anna, had ik altijd het gevoelen dat een camera een sadistisch instrument is. Gefotografeerd worden betekent: gereduceerd worden tot een weerloos object. Mijn lichaam wordt op verkleinde schaal gestold, de waarneming ervan herleid tot het visuele, en dan nog vanuit één enkel perspectief. Ben ik gefotografeerd, dan kan ik gezien worden zonder zelf te zien. Meer nog dan een wassen pop, uitgevallen haren of nagelknipsels leent een foto mijn lichaam tot een groot aantal van kwaadaardige gebruiken. Niet het feit dat Lewis Carroll jonge meisjes fotografeerde geeft mij te denken, wel het feit dat hij tot elke prijs vermeed zelf gefotografeerd te worden. In de film wordt het object vaak vergroot, en het geeft de illusie dat het zich vrij in de ruimte kan bewegen. In feite wordt het object nog sterker gereduceerd door die illusie. Het gefilmde object is in een kooi van licht gevangen, vanuit een soort van mirador houden wij het object binnen de lichtkegel van onze projector. Waardoor is het dat de films van Chantal Akerman mij een niet-sadistisch gebruik van de camera demonstreren?”
Recently restored, this 1996 anthology film, supervised by Robbe De Hert, consists of six films by four Flemish and two Dutch young directors. A group of Dutch people, being guided through Antwerp's past, experiences the city through the centuries in a kaleidoscope of stories, some completely made up and others based on true facts. The films are: Tanchelijn (Boris Paval Conen), Opstand aan de Rie’dijk (Wolke Kluppell), Balthasar De Groote (Nathalie Declerq), Mannequin d’Anvers (Wim Symoens), Hendrik Conscience (Tom van Overberghe) and Gilbert Van Schoonbeke (Filip van Neyghem).
