Tagged: Marc Karlin
Large Door – a fantastic look into early Channel 4 programming
Large Door was founded in 1982 by Keith Griffiths, Simon Hartog and John Ellis as an independent production company to make programmes for the then new Channel 4. Large Door’s first commission was for Visions, an adventurous series of 15 programmes about world cinema. Visions eventually ran for 32 episodes until 1985, and subjects included a history of cinema in China, the work of Jan Svankmajer, contemporary cinema in Africa. Visions reported from the Cannes and Ouagadougou festivals and commissioned shorts from filmmakers including Chantal Akerman and Marc Karlin. Keith Griffiths left the company in 1984, but continued to make occasional films about cinema through Large Door including shorts on Raul Ruiz and the opening of the Frankfurt Film Museum.
VIDEO ESSAY: Reflexive Memories: The Images of the Cine-Essay by Nelson Carvajal
While the video essay form, in regards to its practice of exploring the visual themes in cinematic discourse, has seen a recent surge in popularity with viewers (thanks to invaluable online resources like indieWIRE’s Press Play, Fandor’s Keyframe and the academic peer-reviewed journal [in]Transition), its historical role as a significant filmmaking genre has long been prominent among film scholars and cinephiles.
From the start, the essay film—more affectionately referred to as the “cine-essay”—was a fusion of documentary filmmaking and avant-garde filmmaking by way of appropriation art; it also tended to employ fluid, experimental editing schemes. The first cine-essays were shot and edited on physical film. Significant works like Agnès Varda’s “Salut les Cubains” (1963) and Marc Karlin’s “The Nightcleaners” (1975), which he made in collaboration with the Berwick Street Film Collective, function like normal documentaries: original footage coupled with a voiceover of the filmmaker and an agenda at hand. But if you look closer and begin to study the aesthetics of the work (e.g. the prolific use of still photos in “Cubains,” the transparency of the “filmmaking” at hand in “Nightcleaners”), these films transcend the singular genre that is the documentary form; they became about the process of filmmaking and they aspired to speak to both a past and future state of mind. What the cine-essay began to stand for was our understanding of memory and how we process the images we see everyday. And in a modern technological age of over-content-creation, by way of democratized filmmaking tools (i.e. the video you take on your cell phone), the revitalization of the cine-essayists is ever so crucial and instrumental to the continued curation of the moving images that we manifest.
The leading figure of the cine-essay form, the iconic Chris Marker, really put the politico-stamp of vitality into the cine-essay film with his magnum-opus “Grin Without A Cat” (1977). Running at three hours in length, Marker’s “Grin” took the appropriation art form to the next level, culling countless hours of newsreel and documentary footage that he himself did not shoot, into a seamless, haunting global cross-section of war, social upheaval and political revolution. Yet, what’s miraculous about Marker’s work is that his cine-essays never fell victim to a dependency on the persuasive argument—that was something traditional documentaries hung their hats on. Instead, Marker was much more interested in the reflexive nature of the moving image. If we see newsreel footage of a street riot spliced together with footage from a fictional war film, does that lessen our reaction to the horrific reality of the riot? How do we associate the moving image once it is juxtaposed against something that we once thought to be safe or familiar? At the start of Marker’s “Sans Soleil” (1983), the narrator says, “The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me: one day I’ll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader; if they don’t see happiness in the picture, at least they’ll see the black.” It’s essentially the perfect script for deciphering the cine-essay form in general. It demands that we search and create our own new realities, even if we’re forced to stare at a black screen to conjure up a feeling or memory.
Flash forward to 1995: Harun Farocki creates “Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik,” a video essay that foils the Lumière brothers’ “Employees Leaving the Lumière Factory” (1895) with countless other film clips of workers in the workplace throughout the century. It’s a significant work: exactly 100 years later, a cine-essayist is speaking to the ideas of filmmakers from 1895 and then those ideas are repurposed to show a historical evolution of employer-employee relations throughout time. What’s also significant about Farocki’s film is the technological aspect. Note how his title at this point in time is a “video essayist.” The advent of video, along with the streamlined workflow to acquiring digital assets of moving images, gave essayist filmmakers like Farocki the opportunity for creating innovative works with faster turnaround times. Not only was it less cumbersome to edit footage digitally, the ways for the works to be presented were altered; Farocki would later repurpose his own video essay into a 12-monitor video installation for exhibition.
Consider Thom Andersen’s epic 2003 video essay “Los Angeles Plays Itself.” In it, Andersen appropriates clips from films set in Los Angeles from over the decades and then criticizes the cinema’s depiction of his beloved city. It’s the most meta of essay films because by the end, Andersen himself has constructed the latest Los Angeles-based film. And although Andersen has more of an obvious thesis at hand than, say something as equally lyrical and dense as Marker’s “Sans Soleil,” both films exist in the same train of thought: the exploration of the way we as viewers embrace the moving image and then how we communicate that feeling to each other. Andersen may be frustrated with the way Hollywood conveys his city but he even he has moments of inspired introspection towards those films. The same could be said of Marker’s work; just as Marker can remain a perplexed and often inquisitive spectator of the moving images of poverty and genocide that surround him, he functions as a gracious, patient guide for the viewer, since it is his essay text that the narrator reads from.
Watching an essay film requires you to fire on all cylinders, even if you watch one with an audience. It’s a different kind of collective viewing because the images and ideas spring from an artifact that is real; that artifact can be newsreel footage or a completed, a released motion picture that is up for deeper examination or anything else that exists as a completed work. In that sense, the cine-essay (or video essay), remains the most potent form of cinematic storytelling because it invites you to challenge its ideas and images and then in turn, it challenges your own ideas by daring you to reevaluate your own memory of those same moving images. It aims for a deeper truth and it dares to repurpose the cinema less as escapist entertainment and more as an instrument to confront our own truths and how we create them.
via Balder & Dash
(1971) The Train Rolls On Chris Marker Le Train En Marche (1971)
First the eye, then the cinema, which prints the look….
“If Chris asked you to do something you did it: There was no question”, recalls Marc Karlin in one of his last interviews before his death in 1999. ‘Chris’, needless to say, was Chris Marker, Karlin’s friend who he called ‘le maitre’. The task was to provide an English version of Marker’s recent film Le train en marche (1971) – a celebration of the Soviet era filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin and his mythical ‘kino-poezd’ – a ‘cine train’ re-fitted with cameras, editing tables and processing labs, that travelled the breadth of Russia to make films for and with the workers. Films made on the spot, in collaboration with the local people, (workers in factories, peasants in kolhozs), shot in one, day, processed during the night, edited the following day and screened in front of the very people who had participated to its making… Contrarily to the agit-prop trains which carried official propaganda from the studios to the people, here the people was his own studio. And at the very moment bureaucracy was spreading all over, a film unit could go and produce uncensored material around the country. And it lasted one year (1932)!
This train that pulled out of Moscow January 25th 1932…
Medvedkin saw his kino-poezd (294 days on the rails, 24,565m of film projected, 1000km covered) as a means of revolutionising the consciousness of the Soviet Union’s rural dwellers. Marker hoped his recent unearthing would incite similar democratic film-making. In tribute, Karlin and other kindred spirits in London joined Cinema Action.” There was a relationship to the Russians. Vertoz, the man and the movie camera, Medvedkin, and his agitprop Russian train; the idea of celebrating life and revolution on film, and communicating that. Medvedkin had done that by train. SLON and Cinema Action both did it by car. Getting a projector, putting films in the boot, and off you went and showed films – which we did”.
The people were brought the filmmaker’s cinema, in the same way they were brought the artist’s art and the expert’s science. But in the case of this train the cinema was to become something created with contact through the people and was to stimulate them to make their own intervention.
…the train of revolution, the train of history has not lacked reverse signals and switched points but the biggest mistake one could make was to believe that it had come to a halt.
A big thanks you to Espaço Sétima Arte for posting this great find.
https://grunes.wordpress.com/2007/12/23/the-train-rolls-on-chris-marker-1971/
http://www.film-philosophy.com/index.php/f-p/article/viewFile/206/204
In Between Times – Courtisane Festival 2016 – Programme Selection
“Wanting to believe has taken over from believing,” a filmmaker observed. But the uncertainty did not stop filmmakers from making films, just as it didn’t stop movements from occupying the spaces that the traditional counter-forces had excluded and abandoned. Instead of holding on to the plots of historical necessity and lures of an imagined unity, they chose to explore twilight worlds between multiple temporalities and realms of experience, situated in the wrinkles that join and disjoin past futures and future presents, memories of struggle and struggles for memory.
via Courtisane
A Passion for Images: Marc Karlin interviewed for BBC Radio 3 by Patrick Wright , Tuesday, 2 February 1999
Vertigo is grateful to the BBC and Patrick Wright for permission to print the following interview with Marc Karlin, which was broadcast in the Radio 3 series Outriders on Tuesday, 2 February 1999.
Patrick Wright: The conversation in tonight’s programme is just as we recorded it a few weeks ago, and yet everything has changed by the fact that Marc Karlin died suddenly last month, aged only fifty-five. At a time when many seem to be abandoning all critical perspective in the rush to keep up with the market, Marc Karlin stuck to higher ground, insisting that truth mattered as much as hope, and that the role of film was often to cut through received or manipulated appearances. I met him at the offices of his company Lusia Films in London’s Goodge Place, and I began by asking him what exactly he did.
Marc Karlin: Like all artists – artisans – I spend most of my time staring out the window. Apart from that, I make films. Lusia is an independent company in the sense that it affords its facilities to independent filmmakers, at very low rates, with the best equipment you can possibly have. And it publishes a magazine called Vertigo, which is an independent film magazine, to defend the notion and nature of independence as we see it. Independence doesn’t simply mean a plc after your name, but there’s an ethic behind it, and an aesthetic.
There are people who use the facilities, the equipment, to make their films. The way of editing films now is on digital equipment, and there is this terrible piece of equipment called the Avid. And the Avid is really a producer’s tool now, not a director’s tool, because the producer can come and crunch numbers. And in fact, in some Avids, there’s almost like a taxi-meter, registering how many hours the editor has been there, and how many cuts he or she has made. And of course everybody can number crunch, that’s one. Two, the Avid is used to disguise a lot of narrative holes that most filmmakers now make because they are ill-trained – a lot of people are not trained, they don’t know how to narrate a film, or construct one, or whatever. But, with the Avid, you can make lots of tricks, and you can see Avid edited films now on television…
PW: Even if you miss out a vital sequence you can…
MK: You can dodge it, you can slow it, you can reframe it, you can make it black and white, you can go upside down and sideways. It’s editing by tricks. The reverse side of that coin is that actually the Avid gives the creative person an enormous possibility of making the film in the editing, and, if it’s used creatively, it’s incredible. I mean an example of that was Chris Petit’s and Iain Sinclair’s film The Falconer. And you can really work on the image, on the text of the image, on the quality of it, on the feeling of it, and it really is like a painter’s tool, and, if it’s done with a sensibility, as opposed to a trickery, it’s an incredible piece of equipment.
PW: So, in a way you are winning over the new possibilities – or contrary possibilities, perhaps, of the new technology?
MK: Yes. But the problem is, it’s used by – let’s say television – as a replacement for the human being.
PW: Marc, you’ve been working in independent film for thirty years or something like that. I remember, in the seventies, you made a film called Nightcleaners with the Berwick Street Collective. This was a black and white film about the women who used to go out at night to clean the offices of the financial palaces in the City of London… many of them immigrants, many of them without correct papers, all of them very poorly paid and invisible. That was a film that came out of a very clear left wing avant-garde aesthetic. What’s changed for you since then?
MK: Well, the direct answer to that is that the nightcleaners haven’t changed, and it always comes back to this idea, you know, of Auden and all those people who say: “Well, you know, a poem won’t stop a tank.” Maybe not, but a poem can actually reveal a tank and… I think with Nightcleaners what we did was we revealed the situation of the nightcleaners on the one hand and on the other, the impossibility of capturing those lives…
PW: And what about the politics?
MK: The film was about the distance between the women who organise – the Women’s Liberation movement, who were there to leaflet on behalf of the trade union and try to get nightcleaners involved, and so on. The film was about distances. The film was about the distance between us and the nightcleaners, between the women and the nightcleaners, and was choreographing a situation in which communication was absolutely near enough impossible. I mean, there were these women who were in the offices at night who would wave, or sign or whatever, and sometimes we had to get into offices through very, very subterfuge-like means. The women’s movement came mainly from a kind of middle-class background, and I got in terrible trouble for even saying there were distances, or making a film about distances, and that is what I wanted to do, by and large.
PW: Another preoccupation of yours, which I think you’ve carried with you and worked over for thirty or so years – this is in your own film-making – is memory… You made a film, which I believe the BBC broadcast… was this For Memory?
MK: For Memory, yes.
PW: Now, you opened this film with interviews, long interviews, very still, and no movement of the camera – just these men talking about having gone into Belsen. You move through old peoples’ homes, where Alzheimer’s sufferers were revealing themselves to have a kind of memory, although not quite the one that anyone would expect – I mean extraordinary moments of lucidity. You had the National Trust Theatre, with children, reviving or re-enacting, life on a Tudor ship. Memory seems to be a centrally important issue for you?
MK: Well the film came out of a showing of a Hollywood series on the Holocaust. I was deeply shocked by it because of its vulgarity and stupidity… And yet, and yet…! In a sort of Auden-tank sense, it had an enormous effect! In Germany, for instance, where children saw it and were given history books or packages to do with the camps, and so on. I was really disturbed that something like this Hollywood series established some kind of truth, and I just wondered where another kind of truth had disappeared, which was that of the documents. The documents had died to the point where, much later on, in Shoah, Lanzmann would not use a single document. So, I was interested in kind of pursuing them. That led me to think out how, in the future, an imaginary city would remember – because it was the very convenient thing to say that modern times are totally to do with amnesia. Well, that’s not true. There is an enormous amount of historical production…
PW: Production of memory…?
MK: Production of memory… And, you can be an amnesiac as long as you can either pull yourself, or you can be pulled at the moment of danger, to a historical site. So, you can walk around freely, not remembering anything, but suddenly the leash will come and you’ll be asked to remember. So I was interested in this memory production, which by and large took place in this imaginary city that I built out of architects’ models… Which is now, of course, if you look at For Memory, it’s exactly what’s happening in Docklands.
PW: The imaginary city which comes between all these interludes…?
MK: So it was a way of trying to think how, in the future, this imaginary city would remember. And it would remember because, at all hours of the night, at any given time, you could have a memory shown – you could have Queen Elizabeth, you could have Queen Victoria, you could have the dockers, and so on. So, people would glide on that memory, could touch it. And, then the third part of the film was to do with those who were outside the city walls, who were busily, continuously, producing historical memory. This is the left. We all know the left is fantastically good at orations, funerals, memories… all that. I really had to come to grips with how such a dishonest, vulgar, horrible series as Holocaust could be so efficient, and how could I… so pristine, wonderful, imaginative, a poet!… be so inefficient. So, I had to meet that head on, and that was the reason for the film.
PW: I wonder if there wasn’t another dimension to this? As someone who comes out of the tradition of the cultural left, you have over the last twenty years or so, seen, as we all have, the disintegration of apparently most of the institutions, or the expectations, of that movement. Memory becomes a form of mourning in that connection, doesn’t it?
MK: I have never been keen on this mourning department of the left. I get hugely irritated by it actually. I find it totally unbearable. You can swim around in this kind of amniotic fluid of memories, and just go to sleep like a wonderful baby, like Tilda Swinton’s baby. So, I don’t belong to the mourning department.
PW: But you’re not talking about the sentimentality of being attached to a sort of inadequate, probably half-Stalinist past, which… I understand what you are saying, but at the same time you are looking at a century which has these hideously traumatic truths in it, which tend to be forgotten. I mean, you’re making a film now about a teenage girl who has to be struggled against if she is to understand that history has anything to teach her.
MK: I think history is, in that sense, in deep crisis. You know… what are we to remember? What are we to forget? Why remember? I mean there’s always this wonderful rhetoric about if you don’t remember you’re condemned to repeat, and all this kind of stuff. And, it kind of free flows, that rhetoric, and you have to really examine it… Why? I mean why? Why would somebody who’s totally not interested in history repeat mistakes? I think that’s much more interesting. For me. And you have to persuade this little girl that history is important because this little girl really does think that history is boring… It’s full of huge books, it’s dusty and it’s slow, and she has to live in slow-time! Whereas she loves living in fast-time. In fact, most of us have to live in slow-time, mid-time, and fast-time, and they all conflict. But this little girl has got one time and it’s pretty difficult, if you think about it, to be very moralistic.
I think that’s why I agree with Benjamin, that it is the dead on whose behalf you work half the time. You feel them, they’re with you. It depends upon what your attitude to death, mortality and so on is, and how you’re still recovering for the dead, how you’re still fighting for the dead. I think that’s, for me, very important. It would be my lack of humanity… it’s very difficult to describe to a twelve-year-old girl that she should be fighting on behalf of the dead but, you know, you have to present the idea that we’re not eternal, we are mortal, and that people have handed things to you. Actually the film I am doing now is on Milton. Poets have those secrets hidden within them, and you have to reveal those secrets.
PW: You’ve been making films successively… I mean, you’ve stayed alive, you’ve stayed in work… You may have had moments where it’s been pretty difficult to keep it going… It could fold, presumably, most days of the week… What is it that keeps you on the independent side? Why is it that you haven’t followed many of the people you’ve known in the past, and disappeared into senior echelons of the BBC? What is it that keeps you in Goodge Place?
MK: The idea of me disappearing into the echelons of the BBC is wonderful! I think the obsession is … there is one, again, coming back to Auden. I had this strange encounter with Auden in Bond Street tube station. It was at a time when I was making a film, or wanted to make a film, on the Thirties, because I thought the Thirties was like this ghostly presence, and they had to be re-examined and… I was very innocent and I didn’t know Auden was gay, and I went up to his seat and I said: “Look, Mr Auden, I’m terribly sorry to disturb you, blah, blah, blah, but I really want to make this film so could I meet you?” And he said: “Oh, dear boy, yes. Manchester Square” where he was staying in a flat. And I went up there and he opened the door and as he turned round I could see he had this huge hole in his trousers, revealing his polka dot pants, and I thought, it’s a grand poet – polka dot pants!? – grey flannel trousers with a hole!? In any case, we sat down and I started off, of course, asking him about his poem “Spain”. Why had he changed it? “Oh, dear boy,” he said, “you are not going to get at me for this, I am really bored with the Thirties and I’m bored with “Spain”, and being bored with why I should be political. Let me tell you… and please switch off that tape recorder…” He says: “The only thing a poet can do is protect the English language.” And, I thought, there’s a hell of a lot more I can think of a poet can do! But then, on thinking about it, the idea of that sort of passion for language is really what I think a filmmaker has to be, which is a passion for images and to protect them, to have a feeling for them. In no way to shoot a dishonest image or a dishonest edit or… Those cinematic values, you know, because everything now is so trickery and trickery.
You know, the first person who will film a face in ordinary light… To see how a hand moves – an image must actually take out what we all take for granted. The problem is that there are two kinds of film, if you like. There’s one film that I would call illustrative, whereby you go into cinema or television and you see – you don’t see, you recognise – it’s “heimat” or “at home”, it’s a feeling of pleasure at seeing life as we recognise it… under control. And then, there would be what I would call illuminations cinema, which is really what I’m after, whereby something that you have not seen or you’ve taken for granted or you’ve forgotten or whatever, is seen in such a way that it actually pierces that “I take it for granted – I’m at home.” It makes it strange. But it is actually about the relationship between images and the sounds, and what reality can be created, and protecting that. Deeply… deeply… deeply.
PW: One of your most recent films is called The Serpent, which went out on Channel Four last August. This is your film about Murdoch. It starts with a man on a train who is arrested because the train stops and he decides to think his way through Murdoch, to resist Murdoch as much as he can. It then moves into an account of what Murdoch has done to the television world, particularly in this country. You’ve got a thorough-going, rather fable-like museum of Murdoch’s imagination, which is full of models of Page 3 girls vulgarising beauty, and all the rest of it. A strong film, but also quite different from your early work, I thought, in that it’s actually very funny as well. You’ve got a new tone in these more recent pieces.
MK: Yes, it was about a man railing – I mean it was Don Quixote… Sort of – he will fight and he is single-handedly going to defeat Murdoch. It’s his ambition. But, we all do, you know… Walking along the street: Yes, I’m going to get rid of Blair tomorrow by twelve noon, or I’m going to revolutionise this or I’m going to transform that! He’s a daydreamer, he’s a liberal daydreamer, which of course makes him totally inefficient. So, in that sense he is a strange funny person with these children he can’t quite get around – twins who are totally awful. He’s continuously bemused.
PW: You’ve also got in that film footage of Murdoch himself talking at Edinburgh. There he is, and he’s outlining his vision, saying this is the new – almost the Copernican revolution! We’re going to turn the world of media upside down, we’re going to deregulate, there are going to be a thousand channels of whatever. You then show the audience, who are basically television professionals to a man, and a woman too, I guess, looking apprehensive and saying nothing. And, you’ve talked about silence. Now, in a lot of your recent films you re-show television footage, whether it be Newsnight or whatever, whether it be people responding to how marvellous Princess Diana was… And you show your own impatience by revealing images of inertia, of concessions you think should never be made. What is that we should have done with Murdoch?
MK: Well, I find it pretty strange they invited him. In a way you could say it is a very healthy part of British democracy, whereby you invite the wolf who doesn’t disguise himself at all. But if you are going to invite the wolf, then you better start shaping up and debating. I mean, I think Murdoch in The Serpent… I think he does represent the real contradictions of Milton’s Satan, so the Edinburgh Festival thing was about that contradiction. On the one hand you invite him, on the other you don’t fight against him. You say: “How terrible it is, Murdoch is going to ruin England!” You know, the number of articles that have been written about Murdoch ruining England, as if those people who have been ruined have had no participation in it whatsoever. They are virgins, they are white paper, they have no soul, they have no passion, they have no heart, they have no ideas, nothing. Murdoch, apparently, has walked all over them. It’s Murdoch who’s done it, not us. That really does make me angry, because you can’t have your cake and eat it. I mean, you can’t, on the one hand say: “We’re democrats, therefore Murdoch can do everything he wants” and on the other: “We can’t stand for our own values because that would be imposing.” That would be saying: “This is what we stand for,” and that would be hideous because that means we would be censorious!
PW: Your character in The Serpent, he ends up basically in a loop. He ends up confronting the fact that he’s participated in the invention of this thing called Murdoch to such a point that he’s got nowhere to go but off in a taxi, where Murdoch seems to be driving. So his revolt is a form of ultimate consent.
MK: Yes, and there’s these Edinburgh people sitting there saying: “`Yeah, kill me, there’s nothing I can do, kill me!” Or when John Birt says, I’m going to give a thousand documents, none of which you will understand, but they all sum up to the fact that you’ll have short-term contracts, and that you will be limited in your creativity, or whatever… “Yeah, kill me!”
PW: Now Marc, many independent filmmakers, including people you’ve known for years I’m sure, have not survived. A lot of people have gone out of business, a lot of people have disappeared into a rather despairing sort of political separation. You, meanwhile, have stayed very closely engaged. I mean, you’re out there arguing, you run a magazine, you’re out there knocking on the doors of commissioning editors, you stamp the halls…?
MK: I like that: “Stamping the halls!” I got lost in the BBC, now I’m stamping ’em! That’s good! Yeah!
I think, really, what has informed the last fourteen years, and still does very much so, is fear. And I understand people who are fearful. You see, I’m lucky! I mean, what do I lose? I lose this, right? But I’ve always been losing this, every day I’ve been losing, but I think the idea of recovering centres whereby democratic dialogue can start again, and people can rise and say: “You cannot treat me this way… You cannot talk to me this way!” that, I think, is what is being slowly restored. The idea… You know, it’s not Habermas’ kind of rational communication, but it is something whereby you engage the opposition on a respectable level – that they have to respect you. That they can stop treating people like they have done. And, I think that may end with Birt going, thank God, because I think you cannot address people that way.
PW: Marc Karlin, thank you very much.
Courtisane Festival 2016, 23-27 March!
The themes of political cinema and the essay film will be explored in the next instalment of the Coutisane festival running from 23-27 March 2016. Pieter-Paul Mortier and Stoffel Debuysere have curated a vital selection of films over the weekend 25-27 March, including Poster Collective, Cinema Action, Black Audio Film Collective, Berwick Street Film Collective and Marc Karlin. Below are some beautifully crafted extracts from the programme.
There is a traffic of images, he wrote, with controllers qualifying and quantifying and giving these images permission to arrive, telling them where to arrive. These controllers then turn themselves into custom officers – Art Cinema this way – Commercial Art that way – Author Cinema straight ahead – Popular Cinema over here – Genre this and Genre that. You can declare your preferences. Experimental Cinema, may we open your bags, please?
And yet, he continued, there not only exists a welcome space for surprise, but there is also a real need for a cinema that will leave its designated niche; a cinema where the tension between a world that is being illustrated and a world that is being illuminated can make us live again in that dream-state so necessary to our very breathing; a cinema, therefore, that will hurt itself against that current order of things, a cinema that will deliver once again that wonderful surprise – that which is still possible.
An echo from far away, yet so close. These thoughts were formulated just over two decades ago by Marc Karlin, who is one of the key figures in this year’s festival programme. Never really at ease amongst the mourning choir of those grieving the irrevocable demise of cinema, he chose to keep on tirelessly searching for a cinema of the possible, one that sets out to keep discovering the world we are living in. This festival is dedicated to the work of reluctant heroes such as Karlin and countless others who today continue to embark on the path of cinematic discovery. Oftentimes ignoring guidelines and sidestepping roadmaps, regularly haunted by uncertainty and confronted with precarity, time and again forced to be on the defensive and pushed towards the margins, but always driven by a single stubborn belief: that cinema continues to offer us possibilities of life.
A few years ago, a six-year-old girl accompanied her father to one of the screenings at the festival and she asked him: “When I blink my eyes, don’t I interrupt the image for the other people here in this theatre?” With this 15th jubilee edition, Courtisane hopes to stay young, to create a meeting space where this question is at home.
“Wanting to believe has taken over from believing,” a filmmaker observed. But the uncertainty did not stop filmmakers from making films, just as it didn’t stop movements from occupying the spaces that the traditional counter-forces had excluded and abandoned. Instead of holding on to the plots of historical necessity and lures of an imagined unity, they chose to explore twilight worlds between multiple temporalities and realms of experience, situated in the wrinkles that join and disjoin past futures and future presents, memories of struggle and struggles for memory.
Special thanks to Andy Robson / Marc Karlin Archive.
1
“The film was about the distance between us and the nightcleaners, between the women and the nightcleaners, and was choreographing a situation in which communication was absolutely near enough impossible. I mean, there were these women who were in the offices at night who would wave, or sign or whatever, and sometimes we had to get into offices through very, very subterfuge-like means. The women’s movement came mainly from a kind of middle-class background, and I got in terrible trouble for even saying there were distances, or making a film about distances, and that is what I wanted to do, by and large… The nightcleaners haven’t changed, and it always comes back to this idea, you know, of W.H. Auden and all those people who say: “Well, you know, a poem won’t stop a tank.” Maybe not, but a poem can actually reveal a tank and… I think with Nightcleaners what we did was we revealed the situation of the nightcleaners on the one hand and on the other, the impossibility of capturing those lives.” (Marc Karlin)
2
“To me ‘36 to ’77 is very important for the way it changes the understanding of how you live with representations. The normal film or television experience leaves you without any trace. It doesn’t hurt you at all to look at it. With ’36 to ’77 I realised how people desperately desire a certain normality for film. It’s such an obsessive need, and when for instance political people see the idea of rendering their politics visible, it completely breaks them apart. A film does test how real your politics are, to the extent of confronting you with something that breaks the very boundaries in your writing. Film acts as a sort of dislocating lever. There’s a lot of left rhetoric about personal politics which is actually a refusal to take personal politics seriously – it’s a refusal to dismember yourself, to re-think, re-phrase, re-constitute yourself in the light of your actions and the things in front of you. It’s a refusal to see age, to see change, to see distances, always taking the same photograph of yourself, wherever you are…The representation of workers on film is normalised because it’s always surrounded by and held in the situating of them as workers in a recognisable political situation, and which a lot of people might not be sharing. The idea that they might have other things that would contradict your idea of them never obviously comes into play now.” (Marc Karlin)
Produced between 1977 and 1982, this film remained on the shelves until the BBC finally broadcast it in a sleepy afternoon slot in March of 1986. For Memory is a contemplation on cultural amnesia, written as a reaction to Hollywood’s Holocaust films, a serialisation of the genocide. Karlin asks: how could a documentary image die so soon and be taken over by a fiction? Seeing that an enormous amount of documentation exists, why did it take a soap opera to have the effect that it did?
“The film came out of a showing of a Hollywood series on the Holocaust. I was deeply shocked by it because of its vulgarity and stupidity… And yet, and yet…! In a sort of Auden-tank sense, it had an enormous effect! In Germany, for instance, where children saw it and were given history books or packages to do with the camps, and so on. I was really disturbed that something like this Hollywood series established some kind of truth, and I just wondered where another kind of truth had disappeared, which was that of the documents. The documents had died to the point where, much later on, in Shoah, Lanzmann would not use a single document. So, I was interested in kind of pursuing them. That led me to think out how, in the future, an imaginary city would remember – because it was the very convenient thing to say that modern times are totally to do with amnesia.” (MK)
4
So That You Can Live developed from a project called The Social Contract, which the Cinema Action collective began in the mid-1970s. When filming in Treforest, South Wales, the filmmakers met Shirley Butts, a union convenor who was leading a strike by women demanding equal pay. In the subsequent five years, they documented the impact that global economic changes had on her and her family. As Marc Karlin remarked, So That You Can Live is “a film of and in transit – from city to countryside, from employment to the dole, from generation to generation, from power to powerlessness”.
“The most important British independent film since Berwick Street Film Collective’s Nightcleaners, Cinema Action’s So that you can live (For Shirley) is in many ways a very simple film, about a family in a South Wales valley community which has been struck down in the last five years – the period over which the film was made – by the socially destructive consequences of pit and factory closures and the resulting unemployment… Slow and beautifully controlled, a poetry unfolds in this film of enormous depth of feeling and lucid intelligence, and in this way it becomes a passionate plea for the voice of conscience to be heard again in the labour movement. For the word and the idea to become once again part of our vocabulary, as it was for previous generations. For us all to look around and see, in the shapes and forms of our environment, what parents and grandparents tell to those who ask of what is only recently past, the history of Living memory.” (Michael Chanan)
5
The Year of the Beaver documents the strike at the Grunwick film processing factory in North London in 1976-‘78, which was then described as “a central battleground between the classes and between the parties”. The film, which incorporates a lot of the material from the reporting that was being produced at the time, is not only a documentary of a strike, but a portrait of an historical period, as it underwent transition to the modern ‘civilized’ state under Thatcherism.
“It wasn’t until the early eighties that a film called The Year of the Beaver emerged and I first really met Marc Karlin as he hugged me on seeing it. A film which had, for all the efforts of the inexperienced people who had worked on it, managed to create layers of meaning and make connections between the myriad of things it had had to take on board. It showed what had come to be viewed as the seeds of Thatcherism developing long before her reign. This mammoth work had been years in the making, years in editing rooms struggling for ways and means to illuminate a story that needed to be told, to find an adequate form in which to tell its tale.” (Steve Sprung)
Followed by a DISSENT! talk with Ann Guedes (Cinema Action) and Steve Sprung (Cinema Action, Poster Collective).
DISSENT! is an initiative of Courtisane, Auguste Orts and Argos, in the framework of the research project “Figures of Dissent” (KASK/Hogent).
6
1985, UK, 16mm to video, English spoken, 42’
The first film in Marc Karlin’s four-part series on the Nicaraguan revolution that brought down President Somoza’s regime in 1979, Voyages is composed of five tracking shots, gliding over blown-up photographs that Susan Meiselas took during the insurrection. The film takes the form of an imagined correspondence, which interrogates the responsibilities of the war photographer, the line between observer and participant, and the political significance of the photographic image.
“Photographs are in a way far ahead of our ability to deal with them – we have not yet found a way of dealing, living with them. We have appropriated them in a channel – ‘language’, ‘papers’, ‘magazines’, ‘books’ – all of which seem the only tools by which we can give them an earthbound gravity. We brush past them, flick them, demand of them things they cannot give… Liberate photographs from its priests and jujumen – including myself. We do not need interpreters. We need looks – and thus the task is up to the photographer to renew his or her contract i.e. what can photographs and their arrangement do to defy the prison house interpretation à la John Berger – and make us think of ourselves in relationship to Nicaragua.” (MK)
Black Audio Film Collective / Auguiste Reece
Twilight City
1989, UK, 16mm to video, English spoken, 52’
“The film presents an imaginary epistolary narration of a young woman’s thoughts as she writes to her mother in Domenica about the changing face of London, then in the throes of the new Docklands development. She fears it is a city that her mother would not now recognise should she return. The film cuts between this narrative voice and interviewees bearing witness to their youthful experience of the city as a territory mapped by racial, cultural, sexual, gender and class boundaries, a place ‘of people existing in close proximity yet living in different worlds.’ This polyvocal narrative moves restlessly back between past and present, reflecting on the loss of roots and erasure of history caused by the demolition of old established neighbourhoods. The further displacement of already marginalised communities falls under the shadow of the films’s recurrent motif of the public monument to a heroic British imperial history notable for its effacement of its disruptive descendants.” (Jean Fisher)
7
Revisiting material of his earlier four-part series, Marc Karlin returns to Nicaragua to examine the history of the Sandinista government, to consider its achievements and assess the prospects for democracy following its defeat in the 1990 general election.
“For ten years, the Sandinistas had tried to make democracy mean access to education, health, nationhood, and the sense of collective responsibility. Now in one swift move Nicaragua found itself suddenly transplanted to the political events of Eastern Europe. It was as if differences, identities, separate histories, could all be electronically and democratically jammed. But then in this day and age, anyone and everyone could speak the word democracy. What it meant, what it felt like, what it could be as opposed to what it was not no-one would dare say. As if a democracy to really work had to be by definition valueless, orderless, heard but not seen. As if democracy could be about nothing else but the right to be left alone… For ten years Nicaragua had been out of the headlines. Now that it was officially declared a democratic nation, it was hardly ever heard of. As if democracy instead of making voices heard was there to silence them, a confirmation after all that history and all its wrongdoings had officially ended. But these images, so often seen in films on the third world, to the point of invisibility, were the product of a bitter poverty which had not been erased.” (MK)
Noto. No. 3 Autumn 2015 – Marc Karlin, Fragments Visible by Caroline Chatelet
‘Marc Karlin, the missing link between militant cinema and experimental cinema‘ – Federico Rossin. Read the rest of the article here.
BETWEEN TIMES: MARC KARLIN WEEKEND Fri 4 – Sun 6 March 2016 AV Festival, 2016
AV FESTIVAL 2016: MEANWHILE, WHAT ABOUT SOCIALISM?
Sat 27 February – Sun 27 March 2016
This weekend includes screenings of eleven films by Marc Karlin including talks and discussions in collaboration with the Marc Karlin Archive.
In the 1980s–90s Karlin’s work was persistent in its questioning of the future of the British Left. It takes us on journeys through socialism, political change and cinema itself, critiquing both Thatcherism and Blair’s New Labour. Undeterred by these fundamental societal shifts and the crippling confusion affecting the Left, Karlin invested himself in the continued exploration of socialist themes.
On his death in 1999, Karlin was described as Britain’s most significant, unknown filmmaker. Present in Paris around the events of May 1968 and inspired by the work of Chris Marker, Karlin submerged himself into London’s newly formed independent film collectives. Although informed by an international perspective, most of Karlin’s work focuses on the UK. An exception was the remarkable series of five films on the Nicaraguan revolution, presented in full here on Sun 6 March.
A Film Pass is available with special discounted tickets for all the weekend screenings. AV Festival
LUX’s Artists’ Moving Image Publications of the Year 2015 – Marc Karlin – Look Again
Marc Karlin – Look Again, edited by Holly Aylett. Book published by Liverpool University Press.
‘Overdue reader on British independent filmmaker and advocate Marc Karlin’.
Artist’s Moving Image Publications of the Year, 2015
Many thanks to LUX Artist Moving Image
The Inoperative Community, 3 December 2015 – 14 February 2016, Raven Row
Serge Bard, Eric Baudelaire, Ericka Beckman, Cinema Action, Patrick Deval, Lav Diaz, Mati Diop, Stephen Dwoskin, Luke Fowler, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Johan Grimonprez, Marc Karlin, Stuart Marshall, Anne-Marie Miéville, Pere Portabella, Yvonne Rainer, Jackie Raynal, Anne Charlotte Robertson, Helke Sander, Jon Sanders, James Scott, Albert Serra, Leslie Thornton, Humphry Trevelyan
Curated by Dan Kidner
‘The Inoperative Community’ is an exhibition of experimental narrative film and video that address ideas of community and the shifting nature of social relations. It draws on work made since 1968 for cinema, television and the gallery, reflecting the overlapping and entangled histories of these sites. The exhibition’s title is borrowed from Jean-Luc Nancy’s 1983 essay of the same name, and while this connection did not determine the selection of works, they all bear witness in their own way to what Nancy characterised as the ‘dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community’. Many concern the limits of political activism and the fate of left political subcultures, and all use narrative as a means to explore social and political issues.
Encompassing over fifty hours of material the exhibition can be navigated by means of a printed or downloadable programme. Each visitor will only be able to see a fraction of the works on offer, but connections can be made between works on any particular course through the exhibition, which has been designed to accommodate both prolonged viewing and shorter visits. A screening room will show five daily programmes, in a more structured approach to the exhibition’s historical and political framework. These begin with an Anglo-French focus before expanding to include international filmmakers reflecting on the radical political movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
The exhibition focuses on a period that could be described as the long 1970s (1968-84) – all the works were either made during this time, or reflect on the radical social and political movements of the era. The defiant video installation about the Aids crisis, Journal of the Plague Year (1984) by Stuart Marshall (1949–93, UK) has been specially restored for the exhibition. Also included is a new edit – within an installation designed for the exhibition – of Peggy and Fred in Hell (1984–2015) by Leslie Thornton (b. 1951, USA), featuring footage shot whilst in residence at Raven Row; and newly available reels from the epic Five Year Diary (1981–97) by Anne Charlotte Robertson (1949–2012, USA), preserved by the Harvard Film Archive, will be screened for the first time in the UK.
Extended gallery opening hours: 11am-7pm, Wednesday to Sunday
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