13: Delanghe / Aurand / Jiménez
SELECTION 2015
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.
Courtisane is een platform voor film en audiovisuele kunsten. In de vorm van een jaarlijks festival, filmvertoningen, gesprekken en publicaties onderzoeken we de relaties tussen beeld en wereld, esthetiek en politiek, experiment en engagement.
Courtisane is a platform for film and audiovisual arts. Through a yearly festival, film screenings, talks and publications, we research the relations between image and world, aesthetics and politics, experiment and engagement.
SELECTION 2015
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.
Demian’s Face is a filmic portrait which stems from the elementary desire to look at a person. Confronting this desire leads to consequences, occurring during the act of portrayal. The desire to gaze transforms rapidly into the necessity to create, an inevitable reaction. The relationship towards the person whom is portrayed evolves. From an initial intimacy and proximity, grows the immanence of distance. The images are accompanied by a spoken text excerpt from Demian. Die Geschichte Einer Jugend (1919) by Hermann Hesse, which reflects upon and guides the face.
“A film about my friend Maria Lang. The light falls on a few details, chance selections, out of which a place is composed, the place where Maria lives with her mother. A landscape, a village, a kitchen, 25 her room.” (Ute Aurand)
The playful and poignant films of German filmmaker Ute Aurand, a key figure in Berlin’s experimental film scene since the 1980s, emerge from her intimate relationship with people and places. Drawing on traditions of the diary film, feminism and artisanal practices, her handcrafted 16mm films are filled with joy at the small details of life – from observations of landscapes to friends filmed over many years.
Thirty years ago, in 1984, Mary Jiménez made another introspective film: Du verbe aimer. She made the film following the death of her mother. It is through her mother that she searched for the portrait of her self. She was thirty-six when the film was released. Today, at the age of sixty-six, Mary Jiménez made Face Deal. She makes the film in the months preceding the death of her father.
Jiménez uses her cell phone to film and to refilm. She scans the image, always coming closer, until it gets blurred. Memories, or the loss thereof, is what this film is all about. You will have to decide for yourself whose face is Mary’s and which is her father Lucho’s or her uncle Arturo’s. That is how Mary Jiménez bridges the distance in space and in time. That is how she makes the most beautiful film on this thing, called dementia. The most sensitive also, even at a distance of less than arm length. (Pieter Van Bogaert)
Jón in Akureyri is the second part of Detel + Jón. I filmed Jón Sigrurgeiersson walking through the streets of his childhood, meeting his filmmaker brother and telling childhood stories. (Ute Aurand)
Gestures consists of a continuous dialog between what is shown and that which has been obscured. The work attempts to focus on the gestures and expressions of the depicted. The sound of her voice is present as an indication of a possible narrative, nevertheless the story remains fragmented. The distant glance of the camera struggles and tries to reconstruct a fundamental moment between two people, mother and daughter.