Europe, future past

11 December, 2016 - 19:00
Tabakalera, San Sebastián

Europe, past future
A PROJECT BY PABLO LA PARRA PÉREZ
PRODUCED WITHIN THE 2016 ARTISTIC RESEARCH RESIDENCY
www.europafuturoanterior.com/en/screenings/
www.tabakalera.eu

Carte Blanche To Stoffel Debuysere / Courtisane

An image haunted Europe in the 1960s and 1970s—the image of militant cinema. It was a form of cinema that lent its backing to the radical movements shaking the continent—and the whole world—from the national liberation struggles of the Global South to the paving stones and barricades that made the great western metropolises tremble; from workers occupying factories to women fighting because ‘the personal is political’. During 2016, Tabakalera will host six sessions of screenings exploring the transfers between the archive of militant cinema of the Long 1960s and contemporary film and art practice. What happens when we watch a film from that time? How does the image of the past enter vividly into the figurability of our present? How do contemporary visual creators dialogue with the legacy, strategies, dreams, and failures of militant cinema?

Nicaragua: Voyages

Marc Karlin
,
UK
,
1985
,
16mm
,
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)

Twilight City

Black Audio Film Collective / Reece Auguiste
,
UK
,
1989
,
16mm
,
52'

A cinematic exploration of London as a symbolic as well as a civic space, representing ideals of affluence and the hope of a new beginning, and contrasting it with the reality of the harsh welcome offered to many migrants.

By 1989, the conservative government was three years into a programme of wealth creation and urban redevelopment unparalleled in 20th Century Britain. Black Audio Film Collective’s third work Twilight City can be seen as the first essay-film to map the new London through an excavation of Docklands, the City, Limehouse and the Isle of Dogs. In its movement between archival image, fictional script, studio interview, photographic tableau and travelling long shots, London is reimagined as a nighttime city of light and glass, bordered by a landscape of dreams, sequenced by electronic pulses.