08: Jean Matthee

31 March, 2017 - 20:00
Minard

 

 

SELECTION 2017

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.

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Jean Matthee was born in South Africa, where she was part of an activist film collective until the Secret Police confiscated their films. She moved to London in 1976 and became involved with the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative (LFMC). At the Co-op, she made films from a feminist perspective with the intention of interrogating the existing structures and signifiers of narrative and avant-garde cinema. Making particular use of the Co-op’s optical and contact printer at the time, she has since continued to work in a range of media with a particular interest in un-working geographies of domination. Her work often takes the militant form of a theoretical performance. Since 1976, she has traversed London almost everyday to participate in public platforms, improvising from the floor and often speaking to danger. Matthee’s 16mm films remained largely unseen for three decades until last year’s celebrations of the LFMC’s 50th anniversary. They have since been screened at Tate Modern, Anthology Film Archives and the BFI. This rare presentation at Courtisane is Matthee’s first solo screening in Belgium.

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In the presence of Jean Matthee.

Antigone’s Cut

Jean Matthee
,
UK
,
1988
,
16mm
,
11'

Fragments of Marilyn Monroe’s gestures are wrested from the narratives of Hollywood cinema and transformed through the use of an optical printer. “In Marilyn Monroe’s fascinating beauty, linked to death and to the drives, I find the ghost of tragic Antigone. The ‘brides of death’ Marilyn and Antigone acquiesce in malediction and annihilation. Is this the jouissance of destruction, transgression, defiance or fearless self-knowledge?” (Jean Matthee)

Antigone’s Cut is a double screen 16mm projection.

Neon Queen

Jean Matthee
,
UK
,
1986
,
16mm
,
40'

“Matthee reworks a sequence from Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind (1956) in which a woman dances to the rhythm of jazz and provokes the death of the father. Rather than accepting the punishment to which this woman (and the black culture evoked by the music) will necessarily be condemned by the patriarchal and racist narrative, the filmmaker heightens the subversive dimension of this scene by intensifying the affective power of the sound track and the image in motion (through variations of speed and intensities of light and colour). This reveals the capacity of both the image in transformation and the feminine body to momentarily scramble signifying codes and escape recognizable meaning.” (Maud Jacquin)