Seven images, each staging their own disappearance.
Social & External
A film that looks at the genius of JMW Turner in a new light. There is more to Turner than his sublime landscapes - he also painted machines, science, technology and industry. Turner's life spans the Industrial Revolution, he witnessed it as it unfolded and he painted it. In the process he created a whole new kind of art. The programme examines nine key Turner paintings and shows how we should re-think them in the light of the scientific and Industrial Revolution. Includes interviews with historian Simon Schama and artist Tracey Emin.
Ten years after the death of iconic French filmmaker, Chris Marker. A filmmaker, hoping to rediscover that unique sensibility against the uncertainty of the new century, returns to the places synonymous with those incomparable and unforgettable films-- From the cat cemetery of Sans Soleil, to the mausoleum of The Last Bolshevik; The caves of Level Five to the rooftops of The Case of the Grinning Cat. A biographical portrait of one of the 20th century's greatest and most misunderstood filmmakers.
The Victorian era is often cited for its lack of sexuality, but as this documentary reveals, the period's artists created a strong tradition surrounding the classical nude figure, which spread from the fine arts to more common forms of expression. The film explains how 19th-century artists were inspired by ancient Greek and Roman works to highlight the naked form, and how that was reflected in the evolving cultural attitudes toward sex.
X-ray images were invented in 1895, the same year in which the Lumière brothers presented their respective invention in what today is considered to be the first cinema screening. Thus, both cinema and radiography fall within the scopic regime inaugurated by modernity. The use of X-rays on two sculptures from the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum generates images that reveal certain elements of them that would otherwise be invisible to our eyes. These images, despite being generally created for technical or scientific purposes, seem to produce a certain form of 'photogénie': they lend the radiographed objects a new appearance that lies somewhere between the material and the ethereal, endowing them with a vaporous and spectral quality. It is not by chance that physics and phantasmagoria share the term 'spectrum' in their vocabulary.
Arktis is a poetic approach to the bizarre landscape of ice, rock, and water; a journey to the arctic ocean and surroundings, with images and sounds. Seventy one-second scenes of the arctic serve as the original material, which is then transformed in its texture, time lapse, color and light qualities to create a material reminiscent of landscape painting. The sound collage uses fragments from sounds of nature and samples from a piece of music for violin and song, which are also transformed in a manner similar to that of the visual pictures. (Jürgen Reble)
The Mona Lisa, also known as La Gioconda, is a work by Leonardo Da Vinci and one of the most famous paintings in the world. It is currently on display at the Louvre Museum in Paris and is visited by millions of people every year. The Gioconda has not only gone down in art history for its artistic value, but also for the mystery surrounding its creation. Painted between 1503 and 1519, Da Vinci's last great work was revolutionary for the painting techniques used. After several analyses of the painting, it is known that the artist first made the drawing and then applied the oil paint. Da Vinci was the inventor of the 'sfumato' or blurring technique, which consists of blurring the outline of the drawing and softening the colors to create a play of shadows that gives the figure a three-dimensional effect.
The representation of genitalia in the fine arts was censored for centuries: sexual organs were discreetly hidden among fig leaves, pearls or sheets; and it is still a taboo today. From Antiquity to the present day, the history of puritanism applied to art and the tricks used by artists to circumvent censorship.
Across the installation's multiple channels, the camera circles a group of artists as they sit together in a field eating, licking, and squeezing ripe tomatoes. Throughout the ever-changing scene, kisses, whispers, and caresses are shared with a casual, gentle intimacy that reflects interconnectivity and abundance. These queer and desirous exchanges constitute a portrait of collectivity wherein individuals come together as distinct parts of a whole.
A portrait of the visionary Dutch artist M. C. Escher (1898-1972), according to his own words, taken from his diary, his correspondence and the texts of his lectures.
"I throw water in space with a bucket. A video camera pictures this. Another camera pictures this event from the TV screen. 3 modalities of reality: 3 levels of interpretation. Reality: filmed reality: filmed film." - Peter Weibel.
Sabine is looking for a missing image: a day that has left its mark forever and that everyone remembers but her. But maybe this absence is what allows her to move on with her life?
A spate of robberies in Southern California schools had an oddly specific target: tubas. In this work of creative nonfiction, d/Deaf first-time feature director Alison O’Daniel presents the impact of these crimes from an unexpected angle. The film unfolds mimicking a game of telephone, where sound’s feeble transmissibility is proven as the story bends and weaves to human interpretation and miscommunication. The result is a stunning contribution to cinematic language. O’Daniel has developed a syntax of deafness that offers a complex, overlaid, surprising new texture, which offers a dimensional experience of deafness and reorients the audience auditorily in an unfamiliar and exhilarating way.
Lake gazes down at a still body of water from a birds-eye view, while a group of artists peacefully float in and out of the frame or work to stay at the surface. As they glide farther away and draw closer together, they reach out in collective queer and desirous exchanges — holding hands, drifting over and under their neighbors, making space, taking care of each other with a casual, gentle intimacy while they come together as individual parts of a whole. The video reflects on notions of togetherness and feminist theorist Silvia Federici’s call to “reconnect what capitalism has divided: our relation with nature, with others, and our bodies.”
A vision from Limbo, where the canoeist of the eternal lake floats in his boat, between sleep and wakefulness. When he sleeps, he dreams of the everyday of a parallel time. when he wakes up, the same song haunts him again and again. his boat, “ara” (time, in guarani) travels through time like a shooting star.
An urban essay film searching for meaning and philosophy: "When you enter an existential crisis, all filters fall. Reality is shaded in low contrast, low key, foggy. Every outside signal grinds down mind and teeth and gets caught in a feedback loop. Every thought is a downward spiral."
A walk in the woods become a metaphoric journey in Chloé Leriche's short film. As a solitary figure moves through the forest, the texture of stone, the movement of water, all the infinite pageantry of the natural world is captured in its richness and detail. With the help of an orchestrated soundscape and composed cinematography, Blue Suns catches the miracle and mystery of this world as it unfolds.
An account of the life and work of Swiss painter, sculptor, architect and designer H. R. Giger (1940-2014), tormented father of creatures as fearsome as they are fascinating, inhabitants of nightmarish biomechanical worlds.
Acoustic Ocean is an artistic exploration of the sonic ecology of marine life in the North Atlantic. Located on the Lofoten Islands in Northern Norway, the video centers on the performance of a marine-biologist diver who is using a life-size model of a submersible equipped with all sorts of hydrophones and recording devices. In this science-fictional quest, her task is to sense the submarine space for acoustic and bioluminescent forms of expression.
Cormac McCarthy has spent the last 25 years writing his novels at the mountain top retreat of the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) in New Mexico. An institute dedicated to the formal analysis of complex systems. In this documentary filmed at the library at SFI (and in the desert), Cormac in conversation with his colleague David Krakauer, reflects on isolation, mathematics, character, and the nature of the unconscious
