Placing the Body

20 January, 2019 - 16:00
Cinematek, Brussels

 

“Poner el cuerpo” revolves around the work of female artist-filmmakers that situate narrative from within and with the body. Taking the original programme at Punto de Vista as a starting point, this screening brings into dialogue contemporary films by Ana Vaz, Laida Lertxundi and Basma Alsharif with historical works from the vaults of the Royal Belgian Film Archive. These films all affirm the corporeal, suggesting the possibility of an incarnated cinema, whilst challenging conventional assumptions on feminist filmmaking, the personal and the body. With films by Chantal Akerman, Basma Alsharif, Maya Deren,Laida Lertxundi, Marie Menken & Ana Vaz.

(curated by María Palacios Cruz) 

Ritual in Transfigured Time

Maya Deren
,
US
,
1946
,
35mm
,
14'

Ritual In Transfigured Time silently follows Rita Christiani’s perspective as she enters an apartment to find Maya Deren immersed in the ritual of unwinding wool from a loom. Deren includes another expression of the external invading the internal with a strange wind that surrounds and entrances her as she becomes transported by the ritual. Ritual in Transfigured Time links the looming ritual with the ritual of the social greeting. The film’s continuity is established by an emphasis on gesture and/or dance throughout. (LUX)

Deep Sleep

Basma Alsharif
,
GR, MT, PS
,
2014
,
HD
,
colour
,
13'

A hypnosis-inducing pan-geographic shuttle built on brainwave generating binaural beats, Deep Sleep takes us on a journey through the sound waves of Gaza to travel between different sights of modern ruin. Restricted from to travel to Palestine, I learned autohypnosis for the purpose of bilocating. What results is a journey recorded on super 8mm film to the ruins of ancient civilizations embedded in modern civilization in ruins, to a site ruined beyond evidence of civilization. Deep Sleep is an invitation to move from the corporeal self to the cinema space in a collective act of bilocation that transcends the limits of geographical borders and plays with the fallibility of memory.” (Basma Alsharif)

A performance film in which Alsharif shoots footage in Athens, Malta and the “post-civilization” of the Gaza Strip while under self-hypnosis.

Notebook

Marie Menken
,
US
,
1940
,
16mm
,
b&w
,
10'

Notebook (1940-1962) is arguably Marie Menken’s best known film, and its great beauty lies in its simplicity and variety — it is as if we were seeing her whole body of filmic work condensed in this scrapbook, which consists of nine films or film- fragments, which she shot between the late forties and the early sixties. This open, new filmic form encouraged many filmmakers to show fragments and hardly edited films and incorporate them in autobiographical and dairy films. Marie Menken herself said about Notebook: ‘They are too tiny or too explicit for a remark, but one or two are my dearest children’.” (Ute Aurand)

025 Sunset Red

Laida Lertxundi
,
US, ES
,
2016
,
16mm
,
14'

025 Sunset Red is a kind of quasi-autobiographical reckoning. An indiscernibility of then and now. Recollection and immediacy. Delicacy and virility. The elusive and the haptic. The Basque Country and California. It’s a set of echoes of an upbringing by communist radicals, not as nostalgia but as a way of making sense, of finding practical applications of the past in the present. Within the film, blood is collected and poured, red filters cover landscapes, and images of desire are both produced and observed. The film is a diaphanous, psychedelic foray into the domestic and the political, looking at ways that politics may erupt, shape a life, form a sensibility, and become inscribed upon a body.” (Laida Lertxundi)

La chambre

Chantal Akerman
,
US, BE
,
1972
,
16mm
,
11'

Chantal Akerman’s first experimental film made in New York features a long panoramic shot continuously describing the space in a room. Akerman sits on a bed, at first motionless and then, when the camera captures her again, eating an apple. A mysterious self-portrait of the filmmaker at her favourite spot as well as a sort of cinematic still-life. Akerman cites the influence of the American structuralist filmmakers of that period, such as Jonas Mekas, Michael Snow and Andy Warhol: “They opened my mind to many things – the relationship between film and your body, time as the most important thing in film, time and energy.”

Ha Terra!

Ana Vaz
,
FR
,
2016
,
DCP
,
13'

In Há Terra!, Ana Vaz stages a hunt and subverts ethnographic tendencies in order to exhume a history of survival and political resistance in Brazil's sertão region—a history that persists in local land claims today. "Darting camera movements appear to chase a young maroon girl through the high grass. The present-tense voice-over seems to fuse with the past in the myopia of the long focus lens. The recurrent sound loop of a man shouting "Land! Land!" conjures up the distant memory of colonialism. But the beauty of this collage rests on the impossibility for the spectator to let this past "pass": soon the current testimony involves a mayor who has taken over by threat the lands of the indigenous people. The young girl being hunted comes to personify a territory." (Charlotte Garson)