14: van der Keuken / Rousseau / Burnett / Coppens
Sun 27 March 2016 - 15:30
Sphinx

 

 

SELECTION 2016

A dialogue between new audiovisual works, older or rediscovered films and videos by artists and filmmakers who work in the expanded field of moving image practice.

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Film can be anything or everything. It is difficult to understand that somebody in a film is only just a form, that he can only exist in connection with other elements in the film. All we are concerned with is what can be seen on the screen. Outside the film, that form lives the life of a human being, a person who may well be in search of a form.” (Johan van der Keuken)

The films in this program have been selected by the young Brussels based filmmaker Mieriën Coppens.

Even stilte
Johan van der Keuken, 1963, NL, 16mm, 10'

“I also made a little film that I paid for through my work as a photographer: Even stilte (A Moment’s Silence). In it, I tried to extract meaning out of almost nothing, a kind of little painting of the city of Amsterdam. What was most exciting about it for me was a scene in which you see a boy on his own, playing basketball on a foggy town square. There is no dramatic development at all. It was an attempt to capture a length of time. I found it stimulating to see, the third time the scene was repeated, how the boy’s movements, despite the fact that they were still exactly the same, began to take on an unreal quality, because of their being repetition, their placement in the space, the emphasis that the repetition gives it, as well as the sound, which is also repeated.” (JVDK)

The Horse
Charles Burnett, 1973, US, 16mm, 14'

“In this haunting coming-of-age tale that its director Charles Burnett has described as a “kind of allegory of the South,” an African American boy gently tends to a horse that is to be shot as a group of white men passively look on. Burnett artfully employs a sparse lyricism, juxtaposing the stillness of the rural setting against the disquiet imbued by the impending violence.” (Mark Quigley)

Un Seul Visage (Some came here to hide)
Mieriën Coppens, 2015, BE, 35mm, 16'

“An image as a colour and a colour as a landscape, as they exist. At night, I wander through the streets, in search of resemblances, in the faces and the bodies of others. For whom do I close my eyes at night? A phantom image, a single face that is not there. I show a world that is not mine, that is not real. The image carries my words, words that are eroded. What can I tell, close to the places that I do not show you?” (MC)