Now that we have to maintain physical distance, our experience of cinema has become a solitary delight. But in this time of confinement, we can find our cinephile community in the non-endemic space of the online environment. In the next weeks, Sabzian will select three films a week, available on online platforms. You can find more information about our online selection here.
We start our fifth week’s online selection with Johan van der Keuken’s four-hour epos, Amsterdam Global Village (1996), which is now available as VOD on Tënk. JvdK’s work has a great influence on Sabzian’s editorial staff, as his practice of documentary filmmaking is strongly intertwined with his writing and thinking on cinema. Writing as a preparation or exercise of the shoot, as a presence during the process of creating, but also as a way to better understand the manifold medium of film, as an attempt to situate his practice. His writing was at the same time blatantly straightforward and of a high-level precision. Sabzian recently published a new translation, ‘From a High-Flying Airplane,’ in which he approaches editing in a multidimensional way, watching a timeline as from an airplane. In Amsterdam Global Village, JvdK does not make a simple portrait of his hometown, but tries to “construct a city, using fictional and documentary techniques,” in which his constructivist view of reality becomes visible.
The oeuvre of English filmmaker John Smith can be seen as a continuous endeavour to exert the power of editing, pulling apart image and language, or creating rhythmic consolidations. The short film The Girl Chewing Gum (1976) is available for free on the website of Tate Modern. According to Smith, the film “draws attention to the cinematic apparatus by denying its existence, treating representation as an absolute reality in its own right. It achieves this by using a voice-over to subvert the reading of the image, marking the beginnings of my ongoing love/hate relationship with the power of the word.”
Recently, MUBI has made Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s Die Antigone des Sophokles nach der Hölderlinschen Übertragung für die Bühne bearbeitet von Brecht 1948 (1992) available online, in stunning quality. During the pandemic, you can access the online collection by signing up for free. In the words of Hans Hurch: “A dress fluttering in the wind, a voice bemoaning the death of an innocent woman, a wall of stone with a broad plain stretching deep below it toward the sea, a hand straightening a veil, sunlight on the sandy ground. It is all there in this wide non-hierarchical ensemble of forms, shaped and unshaped, free and equal under the heavens. Nothing need mean more or stand for something else. It is the anticipatory glimpse of a world where ‘nothing is done for acquisition.’ That is the concrete dream that moves this film, and all films of the Straubs to this day.”
Amsterdam Global Village (Johan van der Keuken, 1996) | Watch here
The Girl Chewing Gum (John Smith, 1976) | Watch here
Die Antigone des Sophokles nach der Hölderlinschen Übertragung für die Bühne bearbeitet von Brecht 1948 (Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub, 1992) | Watch here
