SUNDAY 21 NOVEMBER, 6.30 P.M | AUDITORIUM

Private Utopias. The films of Ben RiversAttended by the director!

In its list of best avant-garde films of the last decade, Film Comment magazine placed Ah, Liberty! by Ben Rivers in third place: this was testimony to the growing prestige acquired by this British filmmaker’s body of work. Rivers makes his films solo, with an old Bolex wind-up camera, processing the film in the kitchen sink and editing the im-age and sound himself. He tends to film eccentric charac-ters who live on the fringes of civilization, creating private utopias, or in wild and wonderful places. His quest is to see how “landscapes mirror the personality of their inhabitants, people who arrived there after a long journey, stopped and created their own worlds”. This session, made in collabora-tion with L’Alternativa and the distributor LUX, is an anthol-ogy of his major films, focusing particularly on his recent work.

Origin of the Species, 2008, 16’; House, 2007, 5’; We The People, 2004, 1’; This Is My Land, 2006, 14’; Ah, Liberty!, 2008, 20’; I Know where I’m going, 2009, 29’. [Screening in 16 mm]

FRIDAY 3 DECEMBER, 8 P.M. | HALL Inauguration of season 10. Free admission!

Live: MANCHAS RESECAS. A super 8 odissey (David Domingo a.k.a. Stanley Sunday a.k.a Davidson) Multiscreen showing in super 8 and 16 mm, followed by a session of music with Andrés Duque. Bar service.

“The scrubbing is never-ending... I’m going to show you an endless stream of super 8 in a sticky, purring session, with a load of projectors to fill the screen and devour each other on it. Among many other things, you’ll see kids covering their T-shirts in mustard as they eat hotdogs and worried people scrubbing at those stains that never go away. All filmed with the usual skill of Stanley Sunday in splendid super 8 and 16 mm, and, as ever, accompanied by the best super-8 snippets stolen from here and there and the very best in music.” David Domingo

SUNDAY 5 DECEMBER, 6.30 P.M. | AUDITORIUM

Images of New York, Sounds of Barcelona

For over 30 years, Jim Jennings has filmed his city, New York. His films are more subtle than a simple urban portrait. They are often spontaneous filmings of a single location, street or district, seen (and filmed) far from reality. It is not the city he sees through the camera but its light and reflections. An ex-quisite chiaroscuro of details and rhythm recreated in a deli-cate interplay of spaces. His films are silent, yet they convey the city’s energy. In a spirit very akin to that of the filmmaker, artist Nad Spiro presents a live sound work made up of “field recordings” made mainly in Barcelona.

Wall Street, 1980, 5’; Public Domain, 2007, 8’; Close Quar-ters, 2004, 10’; Made in Chinatown, 2005, 6’; Silk Ties, 2006, 11’; Greenpoint, 2009, 8’; Fashion Avenue, 2008, 7’. [Screening in 16 mm]

Ben Rivers/ David Domingo/ Jim Jennings/ Peter Tscherkassky/ Siegfried A. Fruhauf/ Dominic Angerame/ Paolo Gioli/ Albert Triviño/ Nick Hamlyn/ Jean Rouch/ Anne McIntosh/ Filipa César/ Jonathan Lewald/ Cécile Fontaine/ Lumière brothers/ Guy Sherwin/ Hannes Schüpbach/ Stan Brakhage/ Gunvor Nelson/ John Price/ Anri Sala/ Naoyuki Tsuji/ Telemach Wiesinger/ Leighton Pierce/ Robert Todd/ Alain Cavalier.

Programme: Celeste Araújo, Loïc Diaz-Ronda, Núria Esquerra, Gonzalo de Lucas and Oriol SánchezDirection: Carolina López

CCCB – C/ Montalegre, 5 – 08001 Barcelona – 933 064 100 – www.cccb.org/xcentric

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THURSDAY 9 DECEMBER, 8 P.M. | AUDITORIUM

Film Attractions

A series of recent films woven around the idea that there is a deep-seated relation between film experimentation and early cinema. They all seem to work with the impressive arsenal of techniques of illusion and mechanisms of attrac-tion of early cinema. The session contains the latest film by Peter Tscherkassky, who received the Orizzonti Prize for the Best Short Film at the last Venice Film Festival.

Palmes d’Or, Siegfried A. Fruhauf, 2009, 35 mm, 6’; Pho-tofinish Figures, Paolo Gioli, 2009, 16 mm, 9’; The Soul of Things, Dominic Angerame, 2010, 16 mm, 15’; Coming At-tractions, Peter Tscherkassky, 2010, 35 mm, 14’; Tranquility, S. A. Fruhauf, 2010, 35 mm, 6’30’’

SUNDAY 12 DECEMBER, 6.30 P.M. | HALL

Film Dialogues: Albert Triviño and Nick Hamlyn

Albert Triviño met Nick Hamlyn while studying at the Uni-versity for the Creative Arts in Maidstone, England, where the theorist and filmmaker was his tutor. Their work shares reflection on the cinematographic medium, on the possi-bilities and nature of the moving image and the elements that make up and inform it (light, the frame, the screen, the projector). The session comprises two parts: one in which Triviño presents a selection of his super-8 works, which he considers fieldwork or “notes”, and a second in which he and Hamlyn screen and comment on each other’s works (in super 8 and 16 mm).

[In collaboration with BCN Producció ’10 / La Capella / Insti-tut de Cultura de Barcelona]

A. Triviño, super 8, silent: Lighthouse, 2010, 3’; 50 feet zoom, 2010, 3’; Pidgeons, 2008, 3’; Bombolles, 2009, 3’; Apples, 2009, 3’; Las Vegas, 2008, 3’ Chillida, A. Triviño, 2009, super 8, silent, 3’; Power Hub N. Hamlyn, 2009, 16 mm, silent, 6’; Promenade, A. Triviño, 2009, super 8, silent, 3’; Clapping N. Hamlyn, 2006, video, 1’; Bricks, A. Triviño, 2008, super 8, silent, 3’; Penumbra N. Hamlyn, 2003, 16 mm, silent, 9’; Roma A. Triviño, 2008, super 8, silent, 3’; Panni N. Hamlyn, 2005, 16 mm, silent, 3’Extras (16mm, silent): Hole, N. Hamlyn, 1992, 2’; Pro Agri, N. Hamlyn, 2008, 3’; Self-awareness, A. Triviño, 2010, loop; Mosaic A. Triviño, 2010, loop.

SUNDAY 9 JANUARY, 6.30 P.M. | AUDITORIUM

Jean Rouch. Films under Discussion

Jean Rouch made his films not for but with others: submit-ting his shots to discussion with the people he was film-ing with, before editing them or continuing shooting. This programme reviews the influence of this collaborative technique, in which the film brings its own discussion and is conceived to generate dialogues and encounters: from his first short in which he filmed a ritual Dogon, when his approach was still distant rather than participative, to the documentary by Anne McIntosh, a friend of his, bringing together scenes filmed between 1978 and 1980: Rouch’s con-versations with other filmmakers and friends, discussions about his methodology with students at Harvard, reflections on war… The film by Filipa César picks up Rouch’s dialogues in the present tense: after showing La Pyramide Humaine to a group of Israeli and Palestinian students, she films their dif-ferent viewpoints and reflections on their own conflict.

Cimetières dans la falaise, J. Rouch, 1951, 18’; Conversa-tions With Jean Rouch, A. McIntosh, 2004, 36’; The Four Chambered Heat, F. César, 2009, 29’. [Video screening]

THURSDAY 13 JANUARY, 8 P.M. | AUDITORIUM

Family Album

A series of films that look at everyday moments and the rituals that make up a family album. From birth to old age, each film roughs out a little story and expounds the film-maker’s attempt to relate to memory. This space woven by the camera within the family has been present in the cinema since the Lumière brothers.

Grandmother’s Eye, Jonathan Lewald, Sweden, 2010, vídeo, silent, 5’; Light, Cécile Fontaine, France, 1986, 16 mm, silent, 3’; Charlotte, C. Fontaine, 1991, 16 mm, silent, 2’; Repas de bébé, Lumière brothers, France, 1895, vídeo, silent, 1’; Por-trait With Parents, Guy Sherwin, UK, 1975, 16mm, silent, 3’; Spin, Hannes Schüpbach, Switzerland, 2001, 16 mm, silent, 12’; Verso, H. Schüpbach, 2008, 16 mm, silent, 16’; Portrait Mariage, H. Schüpbach, 2000, 16 mm, silent, 9’; Loving, Stan Brakhage, USA, 1957, 16 mm, 6’; Breathing, Guy Sherwin, 1968,

16 mm, 2’; Kirsa Nicholina, Gunvor Nelson, USA, 1969, 16 mm, 16’; Time Being, G. Nelson, 1992, 16 mm, silent, 8’; Ten Thou-sand Dreams, John Price, Canada, 2004, 35 mm, silent, 6’

SUNDAY 16 JANUARY, 6.30 P.M. | AUDITORIUM

Time after time. Anri Sala.

In 1997, on his return to Tirana after studying film in Paris, Anri Sala found an old roll of film of a Communist Party congress. On one side of the stage, he noticed a young woman. It was his own mother. But the interview was miss-ing something: the sound. This led to Intervista, the film that opens the session. The work of Anri Sala is situated on the periphery of the modernist project, based in “Europe’s poorest country”, his native Albania, in Senegal and Berlin, where he lives, and takes the form of documentaries about the collapse of communism and other films about memory, surprise and music, through darkness and light, asynchrony and repetition. Despite being a prestigious prize-winning artist in the last decade (Young Artist Prize at the Venice Biennial), Anri Sala is little known among film-lovers. This monographic screening is an exceptional occasion to discover his foremost videos. It is a work that shows the tensions between aesthetics and politics, con-ceived on the edge of Western Europe.

Intervista, 1999, 26’; Dammi I Colori, 2003, 15’; Lak-Kat, 2004, 9’; Time After Time, 2003, 5’; Mixed Behaviour, 2003, 8’; Long Sorrow, 2005, 12’; Air Cushioned Ride, 2006, 6’. [Video screening]

THURSDAY 20 JANUARY, 8 P.M. | AUDITORIUM

The Black & Light Series: Naoyuki Tsuji

The films of Japanese director Naoyuki Tsuji can be seen like dreams: in an altered state of wakefulness. His par-ticular “additive” technique—pencil and charcoal drawings over existing outlines, revealing what he calls the afterim-age—presents to the spectator’s astounded eyes a disturb-ing organic cosmogony, childlike in appearance, comprising series of tableaux vivants made up of births, plagues, duels, heavenly creatures and mutations. A primitive, artisan gar-den of delights, sustained by minimalist, hypnotic sound-tracks.

Trilogy About Clouds, 2005, 13’; The Rules of Dreams, 1995,

6’; A Feather Stare at the Dark, 2003, 17’; The Place Where We Were, 2008, 5’; Children of the Shadows, 2006, 18’. [Screening in 16 mm]

SUNDAY 23 JANUARY, 6.30 P.M. | AUDITORIUM

The Black & Light Series: Telemach Wiesinger

Photographer and filmmaker Telemach Wiesinger picks up the documentary ambitions of the historical avant-gardes, calling on the ghosts of Deslaw, Moholy-Nagy and Schuitema. His black and white works are at once visual poems, travelogues and anthropological portraits of the economic activity and architecture of the ports of north-ern Europe. Devoted entirely to the idea of travel and seafaring, the 16-mm images gleaned during the film-maker’s travels are grouped into short sequences that are structured formally, forming a coherent kaleidoscope of memories and sensations.

3x1, 2007, 10’; Meer (T. Wiesinger and Wolfgang Lehmann), 2004, 15’; Passage, 2008, 30’. [Screening in 16 mm]

THURSDAY 27 JANUARY, 8 P.M. | AUDITORIUM

Tactile Vision

The works of US filmmakers Stan Brakhage, Leighton Pierce and Robert Todd presented in this session interweave the cinematographic gaze with childhood and matter. The eye of the camera, like the tactile retinas of children, seems to be transformed into an extension of the skin that reaches out to touch the sensitive surface of objects to discover their forms. Films in which light reveals to us a world of textures, reliefs and distances.

Kindering, S. Brakhage, 1987, 3’; 50 Feet of String, L. Pierce, 1995, 52’; Qualities of the Stone, R. Todd, 2006, 11’. [Screening in 16 mm]

SUNDAY 30 JANUARY, 6.30 P.M. | AUDITORIUM

Merciless Diaries. The 2000s/ Masculine: Irène, Alain Cavalier

In 1972, Alain Cavalier had to face up to the death of his wife, Irène. The successful director then decided to turn his back on the film industry. From then on, in the following years, he has produced an ascetic body of work that fluctu-ates between the unnameable and the burlesque, in film diary form. Irène is the fifth and final chapter of the auto-biographical cycle started in 1978. In this film he tables a series of basic questions: how to render visible an absence that is a presence for oneself, and how to face the ghosts of the past by means of a camera and lay them to rest.

Irène, A. Cavalier, France, 2009, 35 mm, 85’

A letter describing a hopeful landscape against a backdrop of war and fire

Dear Xcèntric,

You ask me to talk about the crisis and the low-budget films that could represent a response to the sinister situ-ation besetting us. However, this latest depression bears so much relation to the end of history, decadence and countless other morbid ideas, that it seems to me quite sterile for thinking about our present and particularly about what interests you and me—that is, the delightful art of images, from Méliès to Domingo, from Brakhage to Varda, and from Svankmajer to Weerasethakul.

I do not deny the reality of many creators, often confused with the equally unstable situation of many others, nor do I deny the existence of this latest high-profile media terror discourse. Yet its obsessive repetition seeks only to con-ceal the intensification of a war that began at the end of the last century. That the most ideologized sectors of the culture industry should be in a hurry to stamp us out, poor dissenters that we are, and that their governments should withdraw the resources that for years we struggled for, is indeed lamentable, but it comes as no surprise.

As for me, I lost interest in cinema’s official Zone some time ago, because it is no easy task to respect an institu-tion that refuses to allow the bravest films access to the subsidy system, in which mediocre producers and direc-tors impose their law on boards and commissions, where the nation’s greatest laurels are given to dubious comic actors, and where Godard and Erice, to name the major exponents, have become the minority in their own parties.

The most positive thing about this supposed blight—the crisis—lies in its potential to confound the strategies of cultural marketing that reign even in the temperate currents of well-intentioned art-house film, conceived for segments of the market. Personal, free, independent, experimental film really has no market, and this very fact should protect it from bargaining and degrading conces-sions. This kind of film does not expect salvation from an industry that frequently plunders it, or from a State which mostly, thanks be, ignores it. Rather than having to meet the expectations of consumers, it draws its strength from its own ingenuity, from its ability to transform the lead of its limitations into a gold of real possibilities and to end-lessly create new narratives.

In some respects, contrary to many contemporary dis-

courses and despite the fact that the film institution is suffering from sclerosis, today’s scene is full of promising signs. At international level, there is a very lively alterna-tive non-fiction film scene that defines itself in terms of its ec-centricity as an aesthetic stance and also as a so-cial ethic. Further, the audiovisual community has created for itself, at least in Europe, a combative infrastructure made up of a few excellent festivals, hyperactive online reviews, arts centres, underground initiatives and even efficient distribution platforms. I do not think that the new vicissitudes of the old crisis can stop this movement.

Accordingly, if we are to continue making good films, surely it would be a good idea to look not for answers to the crisis but for alternatives to traditional ways of seeing and going about things. But how? Which way should we be looking? I confess that I do not have the slightest idea, but I do see very clearly what we should not be doing.

Above all, the heterodoxy I am thinking of has nothing to do with your suit of clothes: you can be a classical dis-senter while being surrounded by mass cinema. Yet many temptations lie in wait for our generation: the tempta-tion of producing film for filmmakers, isolated from real life, endlessly questioning the history of the medium and images of the past. The last thing I want to do is to be an apologist for a body of film by hermits, magi or outcasts, merely for consumption by small groups of the initiated.

Finally, another barrier is fragmentation and the search for an illusory legitimacy. We have to form part of some-thing, promote a sense of community in spite of our discrepancies. Otherwise we will simply be one part more of the economy of “access”, now as a select sector of the communication or design industry. I am concerned at the present-day tendency of some individuals to set them-selves up as “experts”, to be mere self-promoting entre-preneurs, to become part of the cultural elite or high-class set, which are often mistaken for each other. For me, this means he resignation of our cinema, as well as a vital lack of commitment. To quote the philosopher Michel Serres, ultimately, “only those who are excluded create”. Whether or not you agree with this statement, it entails something that is quite unavoidable: we have to take risks. The haven of semi-nocturnal peace offered by the dark film theatre has never protected anyone from the fires and wars dev-astating the world beyond its walls.

As alternative Buddhists say: Meditate and Destroy…

With my warmest wishes,

Loïc

T E X T