Week 46/2024

In the novel The Waves, Virginia Woolf experiments with the written word. Interweaving the interior monologues of six different characters, she writes into being their collective consciousness. That The Waves is essentially a literary experiment did not stop Annette Apon from adapting it to the screen. With her film Golven, she skilfully transfers the novel’s principles to the cinematic form, using the medium-specific properties of film to create a similar experience through different means. Where Woolf uses literature’s temporal dimension, Apon taps into film’s spatial potential to evoke the structure of consciousness. In a particularly beautiful scene, she lets her camera linger over the desks of an empty classroom, inviting the spectator to mentally inhabit the space in a way that recalls Akerman’s Hotel Monterey. Netwerk Aalst shows the film’s original 16mm print.

We stay in the classroom with a screening of early short films by Abbas Kiarostami at RITCS and KASK. Part of Sabzian’s Milestones series, the program contains a selection of educational films made by the Iranian director for Kanoon, the then ‘Centre for the Intellectual Development of Children and Adolescents’ in Tehran. Taking place in or around the school, the films engage with the children’s world which, intentionally or not, becomes a microcosm of Iranian society. Many scenes show signs of Kiarostami’s later style, foreshadowing feature films like Where is the Friend’s House.

Exergue - on documenta 14 by Dimitris Athyridis follows the run-up to the 14th edition of documenta, one of the most important festivals for contemporary art. Behind the scenes hides a horrifying institutional tangle driven by self-interest. The film shows an artworld populated by people who, although they claim to care about the world, are often completely detached from it. The 14-hour film is divided into four screenings at Bozar.