15: Akerman / Niblock / Hirsch / Gottheim / de Boer

27 March, 2016 - 17:30
Sphinx

 

 

SELECTION 2016

A dialogue between new audiovisual works, older or rediscovered films and videos by artists and filmmakers who work in the expanded field of moving image practice.

_______________

Six deceptively simple, minimalistic films unveil the potential strength, poetic and performative characteristics of camera movements.

La chambre

Chantal Akerman
,
US, BE
,
1972
,
16mm
,
11'

Chantal Akerman’s first experimental film made in New York features a long panoramic shot continuously describing the space in a room. Akerman sits on a bed, at first motionless and then, when the camera captures her again, eating an apple. A mysterious self-portrait of the filmmaker at her favourite spot as well as a sort of cinematic still-life. Akerman cites the influence of the American structuralist filmmakers of that period, such as Jonas Mekas, Michael Snow and Andy Warhol: “They opened my mind to many things – the relationship between film and your body, time as the most important thing in film, time and energy.”

Terrace of Unintelligibility

Phill Niblock & Arthur Russell
,
US
,
1985
,
video
,
20'

Filmed by composer and multimedia artist Phill Niblock in his New York City loft in 1985, we follow a slow camera closing in on the mouth, hands, and the bridge of the cello of the late composer, cellist and singer Arthur Russell. We are witnessing this quiet and overwhelming music at the precise moment it enters the world.

Come Out

Narcisa Hirsch
,
AR
,
1971
,
16mm
,
10'

Come Out and Taller by Narcisa Hirsch, a pivotal figure in Latin American experimental cinema, were the first structural films made in Argentina. In a sequence shot, Come Out at the same time dismounts and reinforces the compositive concept of a sound piece of the same title by Steve Reich. Taller is a visual journey, also shot in one long take, through the filmmaker’s workspace.
With absolute creative freedom, it plays with the contrast of the out-of-field and voiceover narration. Both films work with the idea of reducing the cinematic device to a minimum while amplifying the effect that one small audiovisual gesture can achieve.” (Diego Trerotola)

Harmonica

Larry Gottheim
,
US
,
1971
,
16mm
,
11'

“Arguably Larry Gottheim’s most exuberant experiment in the single-shot, single-roll format (and his first with a soundtrack), Harmonica trains the camera on a friend improvising a tune in the backseat of a moving car. Held out the window, the harmonica becomes a musical conduit for the wind, while Gottheim’s film transforms before our eyes into a playful meditation on wrangling the natural elements and movement into art.” (Max Goldberg)

Taller

Narcisa Hirsch
,
AR
,
1975
,
16mm
,
11'

Come Out and Taller by Narcisa Hirsch, a pivotal figure in Latin American experimental cinema, were the first structural films made in Argentina. In a sequence shot, Come Out at the same time dismounts and reinforces the compositive concept of a sound piece of the same title by Steve Reich. Taller is a visual journey, also shot in one long take, through the filmmaker’s workspace. With absolute creative freedom, it plays with the contrast of the out-of-field and voiceover narration. Both films work with the idea of reducing the cinematic device to a minimum while amplifying the effect that one small audiovisual gesture can achieve.” (Diego Trerotola)

On a Warm Day in July

Manon de Boer
,
BE, FR
,
2015
,
16mm
,
11'

“Manon de Boer’s minimalist cinema is at its most radical in her latest work On a Warm Day in July. Like a number of her films made over the past ten years, it features a performance – American Soprano Claron McFadden improvises on a seventeenth-century song in the empty ground floor of a Brussels townhouse. In previous works, such as one, two, many (2012), Dissonant (2010), or Presto, Perfect Sound (2006), the performer is at the center of the film’s concept, and at the center of the camera’s attention, but in On a Warm Day in July the camera quickly abandons the singer and goes on to wander and explore her surroundings. Void of objects, the space is filled with history, each crack on the wall or scrap of detaching wallpaper a mesmerizing cinematic presence. As in many of her films, de Boer uses the form of the long take – which, working with 16mm, she has described as a performance in itself. We hear the singer’s voice and the transition from singing to breathing to singing again, a voice as matter occupying and thereby embodying space.” (María Palacios Cruz)