Resnais / Gehr / Fisher / Brooks / ...
Artist in focus: Thom Andersen
Carte Blanche
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.
Artist in focus: Thom Andersen
Carte Blanche
With its long tracking shots through cavernous library hallways and its skeptical corresponding text (courtesy of writer Rémo Forlani), Alain Resnais’ short essay film imagines the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris as a forbiddingly inhuman landscape in which man attempts to imprison “knowledge” in an effort to counter the limits of his own memory.
An “action” movie in which the processes of recording and projecting moving images are the protagonists and the field of action is the screen rectangle within which cinematic ripplings and combustions are offered for immediate sensual pleasure and enlightenment.
Production Footage documents two kinds of movie cameras and production models they imply, both now obsolete since in principle film itself is.
Locales: Nantucket, Kazakhstan, Grant’s Nepal, Colorado, Mt. Kearsange, Iowa, 7th Street. Door golden night room trees fire drip rain blue horse river snow birds green mountain forest dark room mist car trees window ducks are flying. Overtones: Raga Palas Kafi, Grant’s, Slug’s, Bo Diddley, Jimmy Reed, Raga Rageshri, the wind, Chuck Berry, Marvin Gaye, the Beatles, Piatniksky Chorus.
An impressionistic documentary on the small town cafes in the rural Midwest. While the cafes function as a focal point for many aspects of the rural subculture, they also reveal the limits and somewhat closed nature of that culture.
A poetic portrait of an outsider artist who, in Emshwiller’s words “created a small universe with what he found and could carry on his homemade wagon.”