The studios
OF A PEOPLE WHO ARE MISSING will open as a platform for both, the viewing and making of films. The exhibtion space is structured by five studios which will act as showrooms as well as independent production spaces. Each studio is used in a different configuration of archive material, film excerpts, actual footage and the critical discourse around it. Every Thursday to Saturday one studio will host invited guests and contributors for a series of screenings, lectures and debates.
Studio 1: Too soon, too late
19 November 2009 (All day) - 21 November 2009 (All day)
The image exists on the screen only, if it is a thought. An idea that is made concrete. But having an idea in cinema appears first of all as an act of resistance against the very possibilities of cinema. Too soon or too late it may become clear that this is exactly what cinema is about: to make an alignment or to unalign; in any case one has to take a position, since it always matters where the camera is; to frame an image without making a frame around it, and to glue these images together. The purpose of the frame is to transport time. To carry it across a specificity of places, in order to understand what is missing. One is expecting it, it comes and it does not come, it is always brought forward and delayed. » read more
Studio 2: Mountains on fire
26 November 2009 (All day) - 28 November 2009 (All day)
"Look at Sainte-Victoire there. These blocks were made of fire and there’s still fire in them." Huillet and Straub's admiration for Cezanne led to two films that are about the challenge to learn how to see: how to see better, how to really see?
The result of these lessons is the experience of a purity that is shocking. Shocking only because one realizes all the sudden that it is not too much, but exactly as it should be.
Beauty appears as a demystification and the dismantling of fear through repitition; as a series of identifications and unexpected encounters that at the first sight may look rather odd but then turn out as honest and true; as the production of continuity by an assemblage of heterogenous elements which have nothing in common.
Or, again by the words of Cezanne: "Let them set the Louvre on fire if they’re afraid of what is beautiful!" » read more
Studio 3: The homeless' archive
3 December 2009 (All day) - 5 December 2009 (All day)
The making of films leaves and provokes traces of the making. Material to feed the machinery of public relations, interviews, articles, set photography, mediating films, noise, but also hotel bills, correspondance, laboratory results, screenplays and its different versions - all elements telling another story of filmmaking than the films itself, a story of working. It was more likely the work of Danièle Huillet who loosely stored lots of these kind of materials in boxes, material which became auratic over the years - but also were handed out as gifts, as payment for good work and became again working material. Lots of these traces are floating around. To properly assort and preserve the archives come into play. Also the film material itself, filmcopies, become fragil and precarious. Films have to be rescued from the museum, they need to be screened to find their audience. The challenge occurs that preserving is not about guarding but becomes an act of creating. » read more
Studio 4: A throw of dice
11 December 2009 (All day) - 12 December 2009 (All day)
Huillet and Straub have constantly questioned the possible transformation from one medium to the other, such as literature, painting, music towards film, as a process of re-reading, re-inventing or readjusting of meaning. If there is such a thing like a "Pédagogie straubienne" (as Serge Daney has hinted once) this studio follows the question: What can we learn from their films today? Is it possible to translate the rigor, their painstaking and scrupulous precision that seems so much connected and conditioned by the means of analog film production into what is usually conceived as the age of digital image production? » read more
Studio 5: The act of resistance
17 December 2009 (All day) - 19 December 2009 (All day)
In the films of Huillet and Straub the act of speaking becomes an act of resistance. Resistance against the gods or against fascism. Resistance of a text against meaningful interpretation, alleged originality or the most forseeable such as: workers at work, peasants while farming as well as any further representation or abstraction of a common fate. Instead, the workers and peasants are inverted to actors who are speaking in verses. Deleuze mentioned that the act of resistance has two sides: "It is human, and it is also the act of art." Today this seems more urgent than ever: The work of art is resistance against communication. » read more
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