Selection 8: No Man's Land
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.
Is Paulo a mythomaniac? We will never know, but it is his stories that lead the danse macabre of an existence guided by arms. Through fixed shots, in a unique and stripped-down interior, the camera records his words and his laddish mask. Starting out as a simple soldier in Angola, he says, but keen to cut off the ears of black people during the war for independence from Portugese colonisation, he then worked as a mercenary here and there, and finally for various European states against the Basque movement. Paulo calmly boasts of his evilness, his efficiency and his skill as a Samurai killer, until the camera cuts away to show him in the middle of African immigrants, cooking under a bridge, a typical pathetic tramp, suddenly disarmed to play housemaid. The real career path, whatever the details, of someone who has always confused horror with the ordinary, and has been fed on obscene and conquering mythologies.
Jean-Pierre Rehm