11: Olivier Dekegel / Bruce Baillie

5 April, 2014 - 18:00
SPHINX

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

Rond est le monde

Olivier Dekegel
,
2013
,
Super 8
,
41'

A filmmaker, in the company of a mule and a Super 8 camera, crosses the world inspired by the beauty of all things.

“The film is an invitation to a journey, a journey around the world with the most simple and humble of all animals, the donkey. Donkeys invent time, a form of non-action propitious for contemplation. The film is an invitation to cast a glance at all things in a simple, humble and delicate way. A glance that is so fragile that it becomes a joy, a delightment. it is the glance the 'idiot' would cast, that of the Franciscan monks filmed by Rosselini in Francesco Giullare di Dio, that of Prince Myshkin or Alyosha Karamazov in Dostojevsky’s novels. These references are only implicit in the film, explaining them would have betrayed the simplicity of a film which is simple only in appearance. No action, no suspense or accident, just the slow evolution of seasons, but yet the complex conception of a finite world: the world as a child would draw it, round.” (Olivier Dekegel)

Quixote

Bruce Baillie
,
US
,
1964
,
16mm
,
45'

Bruce Baillie’s rarely screened Quixote stands alongside other synoptic 60s masterpieces such as Stan Brakhage’s The Art of Vision and Peter Kubelka‘s Unsere Afrikareise, which use dense collages of diverse images in an attempt to make sense of a troubling world. In Quixote wild horses and a basketball game are part of a cross-country trip that ends with an antiwar demonstration in Manhattan. Baillie says he’s depicting our culture as one of conquest, but his film’s greatness lies not in its social analysis. Rather it’s in the way his superimposed and intercut images float almost weightlessly in space, creating a hypnotic sense of displacement that lets us see beyond aggression. (Fred Camper)