Sep 25
2014Emmanuel Carrère
Here’s a link to a wee piece on Emmanuel Carrère in the Guardian the other day. His book I am Alive and You are Dead was a great help when making Peter.
Sep 20
2014Peter now screening at Institut Finlandais – 5pm today
A change of venue for Peter’s Premiere to the Institut Finlandais. Here’s some info about the festival for you:
International Festival Signes de Nuit
An Independent World Festival
History
Since 2003 the international Festival SIGNES DE NUIT is active in Paris and world wide. In these last years we have presented some thousand films from around 70 countries in our principal yearly festivals and on the same time in around 140 programs in collaboration with cultural institutions and festivals in up to now 33 countries, among those Algeria, Australia, Chile, Cuba, Hungary, Indonesia, Japan, Lebanon, Lithuania, Peru, Russia, Slovenia, Tunisia, Turkey, United States …
The International Festival SIGNES DE NUIT based in Paris is made up of films, which reflects new views, original imagery and critical approach to the crucial points of the modern human existence. It is a place for cinema that expands its own boundaries, that is astonishing, different, potentially free from the pressure of tradition, ready to give itself to the unpredictable experimentation.,
Concept
The festival shows films and audio-visual works coming from all over the world, which test new audio-visual languages and in the same time are interested in current problems and situations of present societies. The purpose is to establish a global communication which escapes from the simplifications of the mass-media.
The special artistic forms of these films, which combine sound, image, movement, rhythm, text, space, surprising perspectives and different time structures carry not only an aesthetic purpose, but also broaden the possibilities of communication and understanding between people coming from very different mental, social and physiological backgrounds. To create this international sensitization facing the negative consequences mass communication and stereotypes seems to us a necessary responsibility of the modern cinema and audio-visual production.
Open the Space
The minor costs of digital production makes an independent from commercial influences and any kind of censorship- production possible. These independent productions create an alternative, an artistic space very subtle and accessible to all, in contrast to what mass media offer.
This opposition and the preservation of the free cultural space is the goal of the International Festival Signes de Nuit.
In 2013 the festival has been transformed and is now also performed in Germany, in Berlin and Saarbrücken.
Intension
Our target is to establish an international communication and transmission with the aim of cultural awareness for differences and nuances of mental and psychical forms of expression and life styles based on their social conditions. In other words, we are focused on thematics concerning the world wide ongoing technical and cultural transformations in our actual societies and looking for works treating these aspects on a complex artistic viewpoint.
The cinematographic and audiovisual media allow this exchange. The festival is the form of its concretisation, consolidation and refection. In this sense, we want to create more than a festival among many others. We want to establish a cultural forum of communication and transmission, which isn’t provided by other medias (mass media, Facebook…).
From the website here
Sep 15
2014Hito Steyeri – Lovely Andrea
Lovely Andrea, 2007
Clare Stephenson recommended this 2007 film by Hito Steyeri, made for Documenta 12 . And she was right to.
And here’s an Afterall article by Pablo Lafuente on that and her film, November:
For a Populist Cinema: On Hito Steyerl’s November and Lovely Andrea
From Economy:
Lovely Andrea is a video where two women set themselves the project of tracking down a ‘bondage’ photograph taken in the 1980s, in Japan. The protagonists are in fact the artist, Hito Steyerl, and Asagi Ageha, the artist’s translator and also a bondage model. The missing image is that of Steyerl herself, a portrait of the artist as a young woman bound up in elaborate and sexualised knots. Locating it requires the women to undertake a journey through Japan’s bondage industry.
For contemporary audiences, the link between bondage and porn is unmissable. But bondage has an even more questionable origin as a technique aiding the transport and torture of war prisoners. This double association of war and sex remains important forLovely Andrea’s sophisticated critique of economic relations. Whether the photograph does in fact exist is less of a concern. Even if this were a fictional pretext, Lovely Andrea would still be a documentary – one where the documentary effort would concern less the dramatic recovery of a lost ‘object’ and more the function assigned to the concepts implicated in the journey-quest: loss, captivity, project, industry and certainly objectification. What grounds these concepts in a capitalism of interconnected global markets is young women’s persistent, diverse and meticulously pursued sexualisation as the one solid element of the economy that refuses to melt into air.
Lovely Andrea is a document of a plausible choice available to young women and central to the formation of their subjectivity: the choice of being, rather than having it, all – by becoming, that is, both worker and the commodity.
Sep 15
2014Headlong’s 1984
Forgot to mention that I witnessed this at the Citz last week. 2 hours straight through, folk walking out and as much gore as I’ve seen on a stage. And I’ve seen a few Macbeths. Early concerns that it was too televisual soon melted with a thrice repeated canteen discussion. And a finish that took more than a little from The Handmaid’s Tale – it was as good an adaptation as I think I’ll ever see.
And still one of my favourite books. All novels should have glossaries shouldn’t they? 1984
And the 1984 film version is excellent. John blooming Hurt.
Richard Burton (r) taking a break with John Hurt (l)
and Suzanna Hamilton
Sep 15
2014Peter screening at Studio des Ursulines 20/09/14
is a legendary Paris film theater, and one of the oldest to be still running, opened on January 21 1926. It showed “Entr’acte” by René Clair, and “Freudlose Gasse” (Joyless street) by Georg Wilhelm Pabst, introducing Greta Garbo.
Then it became a famous “Art and Essay” film theater, and when the “Jules and Jim” trio by François Truffaut go to the movies, the scene is shot at the Ursulines.
On February 9 1928 the cinema premiered the Germaine Dulac film “La Coquille et le Clergyman“(The Seashell and the clergyman), considered as the first surrealist picture.
The film script had been written by Antonin Artaud, who probably wished to play the leading part, but Germaine Dulac shot the film without his collaboration. This premiere was attended to by André Breton, who read loud Artaud’s script while the film was running. Audience outrage caused the offended Germaine Dulac to faint and went on until three in the morning.
Sep 13
2014Daily Inspiration
Promotional badge, 1982
Sep 06
2014Peter and Muerte en Arizona
Peter will screen at 5pm, Saturday 20th September at Studio des Ursulines, Paris. Very excited to be showing along side Tin Derdamal & Christina Haglund‘s Muerte en Arizona (Death in Arizona).
For more info and to watch an extract of Muerte en Arizona, take yourself off in this direction.
Sep 06
2014The 12th International Festival Signes de Nuit
My film Peter will be part of the 12th International Festival Signes de Nuit film festival taking place in Paris next week. It’s in the International Documentary (Experimental) competition. More info to follow, but check the festival out here and here.
September 15 – 21, 2014
Studio des Ursulines
10, Rue des Ursulines / 75005 Paris +33 1 56 81 15 20
Finish Institut
60, rue des Ecoles / 75005 Paris Tel.: 01 40 51 89 09
Sep 05
2014Infinity Kisses – The Movie
Just been revisiting this 2008 film by Carolee Schneemann (and Cluny & Vesper). Featuring ‘the expressive self-determination of the ardent cat’. Uh-huh.
Infinity Kisses – The Movie, 2008