Friday, November 28, 7:30 PM
@ CineCycle, 129 Spadina Ave.
Part of Fall 2014
Pleasure Dome is honoured to have Filipe Afonso, curator with the Collectif Jeune Cinéma, to present a collection of recent works from the CJC. Founded in 1971 and based in Paris, the CJC promotes experimental moving image work including the distribution of experimental cinema, regular monthly screenings and the yearly Different and Experimental Cinema Festival of Paris (FCDEP). CJC’s catalogue includes more than 1300 films from more than 350 filmmakers, and still counting…
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“From the static to a spiral movement, in this program is included different modes of giving movement through the image, either through an inner movement like the editing (and its characters, and their voices, and the light), or through a movement outside like the own camera movement, but here it is the movement itself that counts and revisits the story or stories. Movement of an invisible energy is tied with the camera. It is the use of found footage, in an exercise of appropriation and an effort to, paradoxically, give unity through repetition and sometimes through difference, that different artists work on the sometimes destructive force that hovers somewhere. An invisible force that acts on us, an invisible matter that seems to be the “self-conscious matter” and makes us think about how we think. Who is accompanying the camera and where is it taking us through? Through empty places and often inhabited, through non-‐ places where major transformations are operated. On one hand these places seem meaningless, on one other hand these movements seem to confer a certain status to the own spaces. Even digital spaces (we’ll see Youtube here) homogenizes the different anonymous but personal digital space as a one only big space, transforming them into a wasteland, a no-‐mans land. Non-‐space is the site of action that leads us to a sometimes retrospective look (even if futuristic), these works dissect image archives in the search for our identity, our society organization, our way of thinking. in confrontation with a fractured identity today, lost and mobile that feeds these resources between passing places. Showing a different range between new or less known and emerging artists, this selection shows -‐ at least in its half -‐ recent works by young French artists.”
Filipe Afonso, BA in Cinema (ESTC, Lisbon + FAMU, Prague) MA in New Media Studies (FCSH‐UNL, Lisbon) has directed his first 4 films in 2012 and 2 other
after and started to curate experimental film screenings in festivals and galleries between Lisbon and Paris (Collectif Jeune Cinéma, Festival Queer Lisboa, ZDB Gallery, L’Etna, Apordoc,…). His work was shown in a multiplicity of venues including festivals, galleries, museums, universities, ship containers, drive ‐ ins and hotels such as: IndieLisboa, the Portuguese and Tel Aviv Cinematheques, Anthology Film Archives, Microscope Gallery, CAA’s Annual Conference, Kassel Dokfest, Artists Television Access, Experiments in Cinema, Urban Research/Director’s Lounge, Platoon Kunsthalle, Armory Center for the Arts, Experimental Film Festival Portland, Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, Sonic Circuits, Crane Arts in Philadelphia, Santa Fe Center for Contemporary Art, ZDB Gallery, Temps d’Images, The Picture Show, Crystal Palace Experimental Film and Video Festival, ArtSpace in New Haven. he started to collaborate with the Collectif Jeune Cinéma in 2014.
Programme:
Alice Colomer-‐Kang, Gate
France/China, 2013,14’12”
2013, China, a couple breaks a moral code in a grand Shanghainese hotel. The serenityof this sexual ritual in the horizon pervades throughout the architecture. Indirect sexuality and genderambivalence subvert the norm of audience expectations.
BIO: Alice Colomer born in 1985 in Paris, she lives and works in Paris. She graduated from “EcoleNationale supérieure des Beaux Arts de Paris” in November 2011, and studied at the CentralAcademy of Fine Arts in Beijing (China). 2012 Group exhibition at la Saline Royale d’Arc-‐et-‐Senans,Tranches de carré sur Tranches de cerles (ENSBA-‐ENS), with Lekh Lekha installation. Her films werescreened at Semaine de la Critique -‐ Cannes Film Festival, Rencontres InternationalesParis/Berlin/Madrid and many others festivals and artspaces.
Anna Marziano, orizzonti orizzonti!
France/Italy, 2014, 11′
I had the opportunity to spend some weeks in Apulia (Italy) last year and to meet againsome friends or get invited home by passers-‐by. Each one looked at the sea and waited…
BIO: Anna Marziano (1982, Italy) is an artist working in film and installations. She studied PoliticalSciences at Università degli Studi di Padova (Italy) and filmmaking at Centro Sperimentale diCinematografia (Rome). In 2009 she moved to Paris (France) and attended Les Ateliers Varan,supported by the Film Commission Friuli Venezia Giulia Fellowship. In 2011-‐2012 she took part to LeFresnoy – Studio National (France). Her works are screened at preeminent festivals such as Toronto International Film Festival, Media City, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Torino Film Festival and Oberhausen.She currently lives in Berlin, Germany.
Doplgenger, Everyman’s Dream
Serbia, 2010, 9′
The film deals with the phenomena of consumer society and its implications. It is a super-modern allegory placed in the middle of globalized phenomena -‐ the non-‐ place of the shopping center.The video explores procedures of (in)visibility on which neoliberal ideology is based. Everyman’s Dream is concerned with the analysis of Deleuze on the relationship between desire and capitalist society .
BIO: Doplgenger is an artist duo created in 2006 by Isidora Ilic and Bosko Prostran video artists basedin Belgrade. The work of Doplgenger deals with the relationship between art and politics through theexploration of moving image regimes and its reception modes. They deconstruct the film medium,language, structure and notions of text in order to discover the ways in which art moving imagesparticipate in creating a political reality.
Michael Robinson, The Dark, Krystle
USA, 2013, 9’34”
The cabin is on fire! Krystle can’t stop crying, Alexis won’t stop drinking, and the fabric of existence hangs in the balance, again and again and again. -‐ MR
“The Dark, Krystle brilliantly re-purposes the artificiality of stock gesture, allowing viewers to see its hollowness and to feel it recharging with new emotional power. Equal parts archival fashion show and feminist morality play, Robinsons montage rekindles the unfinished business of identity, consumption, and excess in 1980s pop culture.”
Dynasty’s iconic central characters: the angelic Krystle (Linda Evans) and the vengeful Alexis (Joan Collins). Equal parts archival fashion show and feminist morality play, Robinson’s montage rekindles the unfinished business of identity, consumption and excess in 1980’s pop culture.” -‐ Carrie Secrist Gallery, Chicago
BIO: Michael Robinson (b.1981) work explores the joys and dangers of mediated experience, riding the fine lines between humor and terror, nostalgia and contempt, ecstasy and hysteria. He has screened at a variety of festivals, museums, and galleries including The 2012 Whitney Biennial, The International Film Festival Rotterdam, The New York Film Festival, The Walker Art Center, MoMA P.S.1, The London Film Festival, REDCAT Los Angeles, The Wexner Center for the Arts, The Sundance Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, Tate Modern, Impakt, Media City, The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The Images Festival, The Ann Arbor Film Festival, and the San Francisco, Melbourne, Leeds, Vienna, Singapore and Hong Kong International Film Festivals. Michael Robinson was listed as one of the top ten avant-‐garde filmmakers of the 2000’s by Film Comment magazine, one of the “Best 50 Filmmakers Under 50” by Cinema Scope magazine.
Thibault Le Texier, The Invention of the Desert
France, 2013, 7’10
How happened the end of all life on Earth.
BIO: Thibault Le Texier is a researcher in social sciences and a filmmaker. His first film,THE HUMAN FACTOR, won the award for best first film at the festival Clermont-‐ Ferrand in 2012 and was selected in about fifty international film festivals.
Théodora Barat, Or Anything At All Except The Dark Pavement
16mm, France, 2011, 05’30”
A tracking shot. We start to progress into the city by night. When the city fades away,actions take over the obscurity. They announce other stories or oneiric moments: the fantasized vision of a roadside landscape.
BIO: Théodora Barat, born in 1985. Lives and works in Pantin, France.Her work between Art and Cinema is made for installation, video and film.She studied in Nantes School of Art, before entering Le Fresnoy, Studio nationaldes arts contemporains, where she directs her first film Or anything at all except the dark pavement, shown both as installation and film.She is the winner of the Côté Court artist’s residency for 2012-‐2013.
Neozoon, MY BBY 3L8W
France-‐Germany, 2014, 3′
The thirty track installation MY BBY 8L3W is a video collage about women who present their pet on the internet. The women speak simultaneously the same phrases, which swells to a common meaningless song.
BIO: NEOZOON, founded 2009 is a female art collective based in Germany and France.The artist group has been known for their actions performed in public space in european cities. Founding concept of their work is the relationship between animaland human and the question how modern society deals with both -‐ dead and living animals.
Artistic medium of their work is ranging from collages over installations to films.
Silvia das Fadas, Square Dance, Los Angeles County,California, 2013
16mm, USA, 2013, 08:00
“The people are what is not there yet, never in the right place, never ascribable to the place and time where anxieties and dreams await.” (Jacques Rancière) One day while carrying Russell Lee’s photographs (from the Farm Security Administration Series) under my arm, someone asked me about the film, the film he assumed the images belonged to. I had to reply that there was no film, the images weren’t mine. But this question became an obsession, aritornello. What film could be enclosed in those photographs? What was the context, the portion of the real there? Who were these people? Who was hosting the party? To what music were they dancing?Romantic songs, political songs? What were the relationships between the couples? How did the young man tear his shirt? What provoked the tension? And the expectation in their expressions?… And why did they arouse in me such an emotional response, such a strong wish for a narrative, even a fragmentary one?
BIO: Sílvia das Fadas is an experimental filmmaker, an independent researcher of Cinema Studies,a projectionist and cinephile. Born in Portugal in 1983, she studied cinema and aesthetics, committingherself to the material learning of film at ANIM (The Portuguese Moving Image Archive) and the Portuguese Cinematheque in Lisbon. Driven by a militant nostalgia, she moved to Los Angeles where she continues to craft her personal films in 16mm, at the California Institute of the Arts. Among her films are Romance Noir (2008), Imorredoira (2008), The Book of Natural Magic (2011), Apanhar Laranjas /Picking Oranges (2012) and Square Dance, Los Angeles County, California, 2013 (2013).
Shambhavi Kaul, Mount Song
USA/India, 2013, 8’49”
A current runs underneath. It creeps under the door, makes its way into the cracks, revealing, obfuscating or breaking as clouds in the sky. Mountain, cave, river, forest and trap door; martial gestures, reiterated, stripped and rendered. A storm blows through. A parrot comments from a flowering branch. Here, the surfaces of set-‐ constructions are offered for our attachments.
BIO: Shambhavi Kaul’s cinematic constructions conjure uncanny, science-‐fictive non-‐ places. Described as creating “zones of compression and dispersion,” her work utilizes strategies of montage and recirculation, inviting an affective response while simultaneously measuring our capacity to know what we encounter. She has exhibited in festivals as Berlin, Toronto, New York, Rotterdam, Edinburgh, Oberhausen, Ann Arbor, etc. She was born in Jodhpur, India and currently lives in India and the United States.
Les Ballets Russes, Herbe
France, 2014, 3’05”
SYNOPSIS: “When decapitated statues grow like queens, sinking in the throat, a grass.”
BIO: Les Ballets Russes are Orsten Groom and Elodie Tamayo: (found) Image and (found) text then triturated through the Ballets Russes’ way.
Gheith Al-‐Amine, The Sheikh Imam Project
Lebanon, 2014, 8′
This performance-‐based video is composed around the love song El Bahr Biyidhak Lehwhich translates as Why Does the Sea Laugh(music by Sheikh Imam and a poem by Nagib Sorour). Sheikh Imam (1918-‐1995) was a leftist Egyptian revolutionary and a brilliant singer and composer who spent 18 years in prison for speaking out against corruption, oppression and injustice in Egypt, the third world, and beyond. Nagib Sorour (1932-‐1978) was a militant Egyptian communist poet, playwright and director who spent 14 years in prison for his Marxist-‐leninist allegiance and his sharp-‐ tongued poetry. During Anwar Sadat’s dictatorship, he was unjustly interned in an insane asylum where he died. Shot in one continuous sequence (plan séquence), composing one single vision which incorporates several simultaneous occurrences – a piano based, a vocal based, a televisual, and a text-‐based interpretation – taking apart the various elements of this love song in order to approach and experience this work in multiple ways. This video is also a document of how Arabic music could be played on a German musical instrument.
BIO: Born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1973, Gheith Al-‐Amine completed a BA and MA in Video Art and Cinema at the Holy Spirit University of Kaslik (USEK). He collaborated (still pictures/Video) with Paola Yacoub and Michel Lassere on the project “OV” for the Venice Biennale of 2003. His videos have premiered at the Forum Expanded (Berlinale) as well as Oberhausen, the Melbourne International Film Festival, the Chicago International Film Festival.
