Materiality and Resistance 1

Analogue Action

How should we reason about analogue film today, its political and poetic dimensions, its resistance and liberating powers, when all discussions seem to be about its imminent end? An end which, according to many, is already a fact. Despite this, younger generations continue to shoot on Super 8 mm or 16 mm film, in dialogue with a tradition, as well as to explore, here and now, the materiality of analogue film, its unique material properties, light sensitivity, and what possibilities its limitations invite. Two wide-ranging programs, one consisting of classic films projected in 16 mm, the other with both older and contemporary works projected digitally but filmed on analogue formats will hopefully activate several of these questions, and demonstrate analogue film’s continued relevance and its important role moving into the future of film.

This 16-mm programme looks back at works finished between 1973 and 2011. Several of them depict times of political upheaval, where the film and its expression function both as a form of resistance and an elevated poetic instrument, and where its transformative and revelatory power is prominent. They use the form of bricolage, a heterogeneous montage, exploring the components of the individual frame. In Joyce Wieland’s Solidarity we follow a strike meeting where only the ground and feet are captured, Rose Lowder films with multi-layered editing directly in the camera in Beijing the year before the protests. In Old Digs, Gunvor Nelson examines her immediate surroundings, their topography and water flows. Saul Levine films the New Left Notes political gatherings in a rapid, chaotic collage that prompted Marjorie Keller to call it “a study of radical politics in radical film form”. The programme ends on Patrice Kirchhofer using the camera to induce a productively disorientating sense in the viewer.

Curator: Martin Grennberger

Screened:
THU 27/10, 21:00 SLOTTS

Solidarity

A film on the Dare strike of the early 1970s. Hundreds of feet and legs, milling, marching and picketing with the word Solidarity superimposed on the screen. The soundtrack is an organizer’s speech on the labour situation. Like her films “Rat Life and Diet in North America,” “Pierre Vallieres” and “Reason Over Passion,” Solidarity combines a political awareness, an aesthetic viewpoint and a sense of humour unique in Wieland’s work.

USA, Canada 1973 / 10:40 / Director: Joyce Wieland

Beijing 1988

China seen from Beijing May 1988, a year before the Spring 1989 Tiananmen rebellion, where the ancient traditional philosophies and social practices confront the political and economical ideological ambitions of the State. Music by François Alexis Degrenier.

France 1988-2011 / 12:17 / Director: Rose Lowder

Readymades in Hades

Photographed in East Sommerville, MA. An empty lot piled with garbage and remnants of the past lives of its nearby residents, the children of whom roam through this claustrophobic making their own private sense of it all.

USA 1986-1987 / 07:50 / Director: Caroline Avery

Old Digs

An inner journey through the sights and sounds of Kristinehamn as reflected in its central river.

Sweden 1993 / 20:00 / Director: Gunvor Nelson

New Left Notes

Saul Levine’s rapid fire cutting has never found a more appropriate subject than here, his film on the anti-war, anti-racist, and women’s liberation movements of the early 1970s in America. New Left Notes represents a synthesis of ideas that Levine sought to inject into a much-divided movement.

USA 1968-1982 / 26:00 / Director: Saul Levine

Sensitometrie IV

Anarchism, Castroism, Maoism, while mingled. But what survives is Nihilism! Alain Peyrefitte in the National Assembly, May 9, 1968.

France 1976 / 05:30 / Director: Patrice Kirchhofer

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