Category: News
A FLICKERING TRUTH – Story behind the lost Afghan Film Archive
Director Pietra Brettkelly (The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins) follows a group of dedicated Afghan cinephiles who are literally excavating their country’s cinematic past, as they seek to retrieve over 8,000 hours of film footage that they risked their lives to conceal during the Taliban era.
New Zealand, Afghanistan, 91′ Language: English and Dari – s/t English.
Director’s Statement – Pietra Brettkelly
As a filmmaker, coming from one of the youngest lands in the world, New Zealand, I am intrigued by Afghanistan with its old land and its deep history. I had been to Afghanistan in 2006 and was keen to go back, for the right story at the right time. During the years of conflict I had wondered about Afghanistan’s own film industry, those like myself. I had heard of the Archive but that not even Afghan’s knew of the films stored inside, and that I would never get access. Attempts were made to dissuade me to try. I had been mentoring two filmmakers in Kabul for some time and asked Gulistan to accompany me. On the day I visited the Archive, sandwiched between the American Embassy and the NATO compound, Hilary Clinton was in town. American forces helicopters hovered overhead and my credentials were checked numerous times as I walked the hot dusty road to the Archive. But a new Archive director, Ibrahim Arify had started just three days previously after years in exile. He welcomed me, and gave me exclusive access to a unique moment in time. I don’t believe in coincidence or luck, but in this instance that I arrived at a critical time when the story was evolving, and was given access to capture that story.
BFI Experimenta Archive Talk – Anatomy of a Film Restoration – 16 Oct
Explore the processes and ethics of restoring artists’ films with an expert panel.
Taking as its case study Malcolm Le Grice’s seminal 1972 expanded film Threshold (which is currently in the process of being restored for preservation by the BFI National Archive), this panel discussion will explore the processes and ethics of restoring artists’ films, how decisions are shaped by a work’s material elements and the intentions of the artist, its production history, past and future exhibitions, and the working practices of the archive. With Malcolm Le Grice, William Fowler (Curator of Artists’ Moving Image, BFI National Film Archive), Kieron Webb (Film Conservation Manager, BFI National Film Archive). Chaired by Charlotte Procter (Collections Manager, LUX).
Friday 16 October 2015 11:00
Agnès Varda on Coming to California
Agnès Varda stopped by the Criterion offices to talk about the films she made in California in the sixties and eighties. They are all collected in the new Eclipse series Agnès Varda in California, available now!
The legendary French filmmaker Agnès Varda, whose remarkable career began in the 1950s and has continued into the twenty-first century, produced some of her most provocative works in the United States. After temporarily relocating to California in the late sixties with her husband, Jacques Demy, Varda, inspired by the politics, youth culture, and sunshine of the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas, created three works that use documentary and fiction in various ways. She returned a decade later, and made two other fascinating portraits of outsiderness. Her five revealing, entertaining California films, encompassing shorts and features, are collected in this set, which demonstrates that Varda was as deft an artist in unfamiliar terrain as she was on her own turf.
Building Networks in a Contested Space: DMZ International Documentary Film Festival 2014
Here is a festival report from Ma Ran, reviewing the DMZ Documentary festival from September last year. Via Senses of Cinema
To visit the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) dividing North and South Korea might be a thrilling touristic option for Seoul’s visitors if they feel bored by the repetitive shopping and gourmet options in this vibrant Asian metropolis. Yet the DMZ as a buffer zone, evidence of division and Cold War remnant has also lent its symbolic weight to an emerging film festival – DMZ International Documentary Film Festival (DMZ Docs), launched in 2009. Taking Seoul subway line number three to its final stop, we find ourselves in the city of Goyang, which hosted all the DMZ Docs events this year, although the nearby city of Paju co-organised and co-funded the festival.
I want to approach DMZ Docs here as a “projective” film festival (to borrow a concept from Claire Bishop), based on a neo-liberal logic that foregrounds “projects” designed to foster connections, from three angles (1). Firstly, the idea suggests how we can think of film festivals as part of a series of arrangements made by the festival organisers in connecting with the urban setting and the national/regional cultural industries. Secondly, the idea also reinforces our understanding of film festivals as never isolated from global “networking,” both spatially and temporally. A network-based, projective film festival is capable of generating new visions and trends in both content and structure via programming and other events. Thirdly, a project-cantered logic is embodied in and through project markets and pitching sessions.
The relationship between a film festival and its hosting city is always intriguing in the Asian context. As the tenth largest city in Korea, Goyang impresses as a well-planned satellite city, with blocks of modern exhibition centres and shopping malls. Actually, the festival’s main multiplex theatre is located in a mall surrounded by sparse residential quarters and expansive undeveloped land. For sure, the entanglement and tension of the DMZ could be faintly sensed in this modern new town. But what was more strongly felt was Goyang and Paju’s joint official efforts to boost the local cultural industries via the film festival, especially given that Goyang aspires to become “a mecca for broadcasting and visual media in the northeast in the near future,” according to the vice chairman of the film festival Mr Choi, who is also the mayor of Goyang.
Indeed, DMZ Docs’ timing in late September is revealing about the interconnections and competitions between this festival and two other major documentary film festivals in East Asia – namely theTaiwan International Film Festival (TIDF, established 1998 and held annually held since 2014, this event takes place just after DMZ Docs in early October) and the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival in Japan (YIDFF, established in 1989, this biennial event takes place in mid-October). Kicking off on September 17, DMZ Docs’ sixth edition boasted a line-up of 111 documentary films and three major competitive sections: the International Competition (twelve films), the Korean Competition (nine films) and Youth Competition (Korean short films by students), besides themed sidebars. Although the festival promoted a too generalized value of “peace, communication and life” in its booklet this year, its highly diversified programme incorporated some of the most exciting 2013-14 productions from around the world, to highlight refreshing methodologies, daring experiments and pressing issues in documentary cinema. It seemed as if the programmers were trying to bombard festivalgoers with as heterogeneous a selection as possible, in order to leave “what counts as a documentary” an open question.
At the same time, the retrospectives on Marc Karlin and Italian documentaries (from filmmakers such as Pier Paolo Pasolini and Cecilia Mangini) were simply too valuable to be ignored this year. The festival paid tribute to Karlin (1943-1999) in its “Masters” section, with a body of work that was introduced to the Asian world for the first time. The screenings also anticipated two major publications in the UK on this highly significant, yet little known British filmmaker.
Karlin carefully constructed his politically charged cinematic essays with hybridized materials from reenactments, found footage, interviews and even installations. Karlin’s filmmaking sets out to carve a space for what the director calls a “dream state,” full of the tension “between a world that is being illustrated and a world that is being illuminated” (2). While you might find in films such as Nightcleaners (Berwick Street Collection, 1975), For Memory (1982) and Utopias (1989) the Marker-esque traces of insightful contemplations and debates upon memory, history and the agency of people, we also notice that Karlin’s obsession with a cinema which reasons and thinks is also rooted in the sociohistorical undercurrents of his time. Instead of didactically addressing issues of class, gender, ideology and so forth, Karlin’s pursuit actually ventures into effectively engaging with the spectators via formal/structural experimentations.
In Nightcleaners, for example, Karlin and his colleagues approached the issue of unionizing underpaid women office cleaners in the 1970s by turning away from the conventions of observational documentary filmmaking of the time. That the film is a work being directed and constructed is revealed at the very beginning, as it “contains within itself a reflection of its own involvement in the history of the events being filmed” (3).
Even images of the interviewed subjects prove to be an unorthodox study of physiognomy, as the camera zooms in and out, adjusting its distance from the interviewee, while the spectators are confronted with partial facial expressions, movements of eyes and sometimes mismatching voice tracks which disrupt any authoritatively imposed meaning of the images. The filmmakers’ manipulation of images and sound therefore not only throw up questions about documentary truth and photographic images, it also positions the night cleaners’ fight and their campaign in a multi-layered, historically complex space in which tensions exist between the cleaners, the Cleaner’s Action Group and the unions.
DMZ Docs might be one of the contact points, no matter how limited the scope of reception, for spectators to trace the genealogy of global political filmmaking. Thus we may want to rethink the significance of a retrospective such as the one on Karlin. If films like Nightcleaners “could provide the basis for a new direction in British political filmmaking” in 1975 (festival catalogue), is a Karlin retrospective in 2014 simply about the rediscovery and redefinition of a lesser-known filmmaker vis-à-vis film history? Or could it also be a programming gesture of broader social significance? The retrospective may also offer documentary filmmakers and the like working with socially engaged methods and topics a certain framework of reference in speaking from a geopolitical perspective, as democracy protests and civil campaigns are renewed across East Asia in locales such as Okinawa, Seoul, Taipei, Hong Kong, and even some Mainland Chinese cities.
Read the rest of Ma Ran’s article here.
Senses of Cinema – Festival Report – Dec 2014 – Issue 73
Bristol Radical Film Festival 2015 – 9-11 October
The programme for this year’s Bristol Radical Film Festival, which takes place at the Arnolfini gallery from 9-11 October has just been announced. Full programme and tickets available now from the Arnolfini website here:
http://www.arnolfini.org.uk/whatson/the-bristol-radical-film-festival.
This year the festival is dedicated to commemorating the 40th anniversary of the First Festival of British Independent Cinema, which took place at the Arnolfini in 1975. Organised by the filmmaker, writer and curator, David Hopkins (1940-2004), the 1975 festival was a landmark event in the history of alternative film in Britain, screening overtly political film alongside aesthetically radical work in celebration of a vibrant independent film culture comprised of different forms, approaches and traditions.
Highlights include Laura Mulvey in conversation with Patti Gaal-Holmes, Reel News’ Shaun Dey alongside Cinema Action’s Steve Sprung, Liberation Film’s Starting to Happen with community filmmaker Ed Webb-Ingall, and a special screening of the recently re-released Blacks Brittanica with producer Margaret Henry.
Festival Pass : Bristol Radical Film Festival 2015
£40 / £35 conc. → Book
‘World Cinema and the Essay Film’ Conference: Keynote by Prof Timothy Corrigan
Organised by the University of Reading’s Centre for Film Aesthetics and Cultures (CFAC), the ‘World Cinema and the Essay Film’ conference (30 April – 2 May 2015) featured Prof Timothy Corrigan’s (University of Pennsylvania) keynote address on ‘Essayism and Contemporary Film Narrative’, in which he describes how the mode of essayist becomes more and more frequently a disruptive force in narrative films such as Tree of Life (Malick 2011) or The Mill and the Cross (Majewski 2011).
Timothy Corrigan is a Professor of English and Cinema Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He received a B.A. from the University of Notre Dame, and completed graduate work at the University of Leeds, Emory University, and the University of Paris III. Books include The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History (Routledge), A Cinema without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam (Routledge), New German Film: The Displaced Image (Indiana UP), Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader (Routledge), The Film Experience (Bedford/St. Martin’s), Critical Visions: Readings in Classic and Contemporary Film Theory (Bedford/St. Martin’s, both co-authored with Patricia White), American Cinema of the 2000s (Rutgers UP), and The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (Oxford UP), winner of the 2012 Katherine Singer Kovács Award for the outstanding book in film and media studies.
Prof Corrigan’s keynote speech abstract ‘Essayism in Contemporary Film Narrative‘
The essay, the essayistic, and essayism represent three related modes that, at their core, test and explore subjectivity as it encounters a public life and subsequently generates and monitors the possibilities of thought and thinking. The first is a semi-generic product, the second an intervention, and the third a kind of knowledge. The relation of each to other practices, such as narrative, is largely a question of ratios: as assimilative, as inflective, or as disruptive. My title obviously draws on the third mode, and aims to describe and argue a way in which the heritage and distinctions of the essay take a different form than those described more essentially by the essay film. Here, essayism becomes more and more frequently a disruptive force and presence within the presiding shape of a film narrative, a disruption that questions, at its heart, the limits and possibilities of film narrative itself. Specifically and too schematically, essayism questions the interiority of film narrative 1) through the disintegration of narrative agency as a singular and coherent figure, 2) through the exploration of the margins of temporality and history (as a realism) in a movement into unsheltered and “improbable” places, and 3) through the questioning of the knowledges that have conventionally sustained narrative. My two examples will be Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life and Lech Majewski’s The Mill and the Cross, both released in 2011, both engaged with and questioning–not coincidently I think–a dominant Judeo-Christian narrative as the foundation of knowledge, and both operating on the edges of conventional narrative form.
Timothy Corrigan University of Pennsylvania
Date: 30 April – 2 May 2015
Venue: Minghella Building, Whiteknights Campus, University of Reading
Conference convenor: Dr Igor Krstic
ARDECHE IMAGES – Les États généraux du film documentaire 17th-18th Aug 2015
Fragments of a filmmaker – Marc Karlin
Marc Karlin (1943-1999) belongs to that generation of filmmakers who, after having gone through the militant experience of the sixties and seventies, developed a new political filmmaking praxis in the eighties (the years of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan) by rethinking and moving beyond the Marxist tradition. His political activism expressed itself in a radical approach to documentary aesthetics and a constant attempt to build an alternative film culture in opposition to the media system – he was the editor and publisher of an independent film journal, Vertigo, founded in 1993. From Nightcleaners Part 1 (1972-75), made as a member of the Berwick Street Film Collective, Karlin saw the film form as a mirror of the revolutionary process: aesthetics had to be as radical as politics. All the rushes of the film, too similar to a classical agit-prop documentary, were completely deconstructed using the optical printer and the editing: the result was a complex avant-garde film about the contradictions of militant thinking and the women’s struggle for rights and union recognition. The discrepancies of militant cinema were inscribed directly in the film language and its materiality: this was the trademark of Karlin’s future work. In the eighties and nineties, Karlin made twelve films: he benefited from the new challenges and openings in television made possible by Channel 4 and he carved out a space that left uncompromised his political vision. The film form that Karlin thought about and refounded is the essay film: a hybrid form, open to political actuality (the revolution in Nicaragua for example), simultaneously turning to the past – considered as an archive of the oppressed – and towards the future – considered as a utopian promise. This hybrid form assembled elements from the archive (making visual metaphors and conceptual short circuit), arguments and quotations (a multi-layered literary voicing and a fragmented narrative), and an elegant visual choreography (camera tracking through space and time). At the beginning of the decade of the ascending neoliberalism, the age of oblivion, Karlin made For Memory (1982), an unorthodox portrait of capitalism, the growing of cultural amnesia and the tyranny of memory: the act of remembering is shown as an interrogation of the future and as a walk through the British revolutionary tradition – John Milton and the Levellers. Disappointed by the times he was living in Europe, Karlin, an internationalist socialist, was immediately interested in the Nicaragua revolution (that began in 1979 with the end of Somoza’s regime) and he decided to make a series of films about this challenging process. The starting point was a photobook made by Susan Meiselas: Voyages (1985) was the first of a four parts series that found a coda in 1991 with Scenes for a Revolution. Karlin never made a triumphant portrait of the country and never interviewed the main Sandinista leaders, as he wanted to be with the ordinary Nicaraguan people, filming from the roots and not from the top of the country. For each part of the project he invented and adjusted a dialectical film form in order to reveal all the daily beauty and the hard contradictions of the revolution. The five Nicaraguan films are not effective political or propaganda tools, nor ideological manifestos; they are subtle thinking forms about real struggle and real people. The following part of Karlin’s research about revolution was Utopias (1989), a melancholic and pensive essay about the crisis and the heritage of the left. Utopias was Karlin’s response to Margaret Thatcher’s claim that socialism was dead: the film is structured around an imaginary banquet where six guests, from different factions of the left are invited to debate the relevance of the socialist project for their own life’s work. If Utopias was about the past of the left, Between Times (1993) was a kind of a bitter coda made to imagine the future of the revolutionary tradition. After the collapse of the Soviet system and the birth of Tony Blair’s New Labour, Karlin was trying to make a film not about definitions, but an invitation to think about the possibility to find a place for the word “us” in the current political vocabulary and to build a possible resistance to barbarity. When Marc Karlin died, in 1999, The Independent wrote that he “was the most significant, unknown filmmaker working in Britain during the past three decades”: his work is now rediscovered, and we see it as an important missing figure in the documentary film history, the lost-and-found link between militant and experimental cinema.
By Federico Rossin
Partnered with the Marc Karlin Archive – Hermione Harris, Holly Aylett and Andy Robson.
Debates led by Federico Rossin – 17th-18th Aug 2105
See here for full schedule.
Marker Month – Chris Marker Retrospective on MUBI UK
This summer MUBI UK be hosting a retrospective on one of the all-time favourite auteurs, Master film & video essayist Chris Marker. Each week MUBI will play one of his most iconic works.
Man with a Movie Camera (2014 Restoration trailer) In UK cinemas 31 July 2015 | BFI Release
One the most influential films in cinema history, Dziga Vertov’s exhilarating ode to Bolshevik Russia returns to cinemas across the UK from 31 July 2015.
‘I am the camera eye, I am the mechanical eye. I am the machine which shows you the world as only I can see it’
– Dziga Vertov
“Man with a Movie Camera” met with bewilderment on its release but is now recognised as one of the most radical films of Soviet cinema, and a major influence on Godard, Marker and others.
It’s a great city-symphony: the ‘Kino-Eye’ turns the camera into the protagonist, providing an impressionistic, lyrical portrait of a day in the life of Moscow’s masses at work and at play. But Vertov also investigates film itself, wittily transforming the world caught by his lens with a dazzling array of experimental camera and editing techniques. The constant invention remains astonishing to this day.
Marc Karlin on Karl-Marx-Allee – Cinemateca Nacional de Nicaragua – July 3 2015
In commemoration of the 36th anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution, the Nicaraguan Embassy in Germany arranged a Berlin screening of the documentary “La Construcción De Una Nación” (The Making of a Nation) (1985) director by Marc Karlin.
Ambassador Mrs. Karla Beteta Brenes, opened up the event which took place in Cafe Sibylle located in Berlin’s historic Karl-Marx-Allee. The cafe also acts as a museum to the street, displaying it’s turbulent history.
The documentary received great reception from the audience who highlighted the great work done by the director and the historical significance of the film.
The projection was made with the support of National Cinematheque of Nicaragua and forms part of the commemorative series organized by the embassy which takes place from July 3 to 10 and includes photography, poetry, documentary film and music.
This is one of many examples of the efforts in different countries to commemorate the 36th anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution.
via Cinemateca Nacional de Nicaragua
marckarlin 