Selection 6: Resist
Recent film and video by artists and filmmakers who open up new directions in the expanded field of contemporary moving image practice.
Courtisane is een platform voor film en audiovisuele kunsten. In de vorm van een jaarlijks festival, filmvertoningen, gesprekken en publicaties onderzoeken we de relaties tussen beeld en wereld, esthetiek en politiek, experiment en engagement.
Courtisane is a platform for film and audiovisual arts. Through a yearly festival, film screenings, talks and publications, we research the relations between image and world, aesthetics and politics, experiment and engagement.
Recent film and video by artists and filmmakers who open up new directions in the expanded field of contemporary moving image practice.
A color-separation portrait of the Exarchia neighborhood of Athens, Greece, made during the Anti-Austerity protests in late 2011. In a place thick with stray cats and scooters, cops and Molotovs, ancient myths and new ruins; where fists are raised like so many columns in the Parthenon, this is a film of surfaces - of grafittied marble streets and wheat-pasted city walls - hand-processed in red, green, and blue.
In Greece the advertisement in exterior billboards has been recently forbidden. As a result there are hundreds of empty frames that don’t carry any messages. But the empty frames are now the message. And Greece is out of frame.
A Unesco World Heritage Site, Saint-Petersburg, which survived a 900-day Nazi siege in World War Two, is today under threat again: over the past several years, Russia's new capitalists have demolished over two hundred historic buildings in the city. Retracing Dmitry Likhachev's eponymous article, draws parallels between the siege of Leningrad and the defense of medieval Russian cities as described in the chronicles.
Rhinoceros involves the fascinating figure of Alessandro de’ Medici as he makes a passionate appeal to rally the good people of Florence. In black and white video, the film resembles a televised broadcast in the last days of Muammar Gaddafi. This short film sets the stage for Everson's upcoming feature, "Rhino" that will examine the parallel worlds of politics and performance in sixteenth century Italy and twentieth century Hollywood, through the personages of de’Medici and the actress Gail Fisher (Mannix).