Film and Video

Liliana Porter (Buenos Aires, 1941) is the only female Latin American artist whose work is included in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía’s audiovisual collection. For You/Para usted (1999) has its origins in a photographic series the artist did using toys and figurines going about their daily business, which Porter reformulated adding sound, rhythm and narration. From this point of view, the piece is closely connected to her earlier work in painting, drawing and photography, which already manifested the peculiar aspects of her personal narrative, far removed from traditional formulas. As Ana Tiscornia has noted, For You/Para usted is another step in the destabilisation of the conventional ideas of reality that prevails in Liliana Porter’s work. The video, originally shot in 16 mm, craftily uses the basic characteristics of the medium - emphasising time and movement - to present a scene that takes place almost completely off stage, in the mind of the viewer. In this presentation, Porter analyses her piece and illustrates the relationship between the video and the context of her work.

Inspired by the short story Beatles contra Duran-Duran, by the Cuban writer Mirta Yáñez (Havana, 1947), Madagascar (1994) by Fernando Pérez (Havana, 1944) revolves around the contradictions experienced by a university professor who has lost the ability to dream in Cuba during the 1990s economic crisis known as the ‘special period’ and her teenage daughter, who dreams of travelling to Madagascar. Their relationship, which is full of misunderstandings and mutual alienation, is depicted as an exercise in human communication. Its cinematic expressiveness, aesthetic pursuit and the humanity of its characters make Madagascar not only an innovative film, but also an important reading of the cinema of the times. This subtle story about the conflict between tradition and modernity has received numerous awards and distinctions, including the Special Jury Prize and Special Cuban Critics Prize at the 16^th International Festival of New Latin American Cinema (1994) and the World Cinema Prize for Best Latin American Film at the 12^th Sundance Film Festival.

With B&W and Colour. Latin America: cinema, video and multimedia, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía presents an up-to-date panorama of Latin American audiovisual art along with an exhibition entitled Agitation as Daily Ritual - Cartographies of Desire that brings 30 films and videos made by female artists between 1965 and 1987 to Spain for the first time. B&W and Colour crosses conventional boundaries, not only because of its unusual nature, variety and the contents of the selected works, but because of its pluralist inclination. Most of these pieces deal with the fragmentation of society into different ethnic, social and cultural groups and show us how to decode a culture that seems closer than it really is.

Cameras, screens, computers, recorders, photocopiers, printers, scanners, holograms, magnetic material and CDs are a regular part of the contemporary scene as both instruments and ubiquitous, versatile media. The electronic and media arts are not the result of the seduction of novelty, but rather a consequence of responsible proximity to what is happening in the world. The arts have adopted instruments from the information and communication industries and factories and given them other functions and configurations that make abundant use of inter-, multi- and transmedia amalgams.

Calculated Cinema is a film and video series that focuses its attention on the pioneering use of computers and electronics in experimental films as expressed in works by filmmakers like Oskar Fischinger (Gelnhausen, 1900 - Los Angeles, 1967), Mary Ellen Bute (Houston, 1906 - New York, 1983), John (Pasadena, 1917 - Los Angeles, 1995) and James Whitney (Pasadena, 1921 - Los Angeles, 1982), Jordan Belson (Chicago, 1926 - San Francisco, 2011), Peter Kubelka (Vienna, 1934), Werner Nekes (Erfurt, 1944), Larry Cuba (Atlanta, 1950) and Robert Darroll (England, 1946).

This programme presents a broad and representative cross-section of the work of Robert Cahen (Valence, 1945), a filmmaker, photographer and composer who has made more than fifty films and videos since 1973, when he first became interested in the audiovisual arts after meeting Pierre Schaeffer (Nancy, 1910 - Aix, 1995), with whom he studied Musique concrète at the Conservatoire de Paris. Cahen finds inspiration in images and memories, in the sensations of travelling, the world of theatre, dance and art, and in the visual and sound experiments that he has been conducting with electronic images and Musique concrète for more than thirty years. In every case, his extraordinary knowledge of the music world shapes the work, its conception and its rhythm.

Twenty-five years separate the first video work by Antoni Muntadas (Barcelona, 1942), Acciones (a study of the so-called sub-senses carried out from a series of experiments done between 1971 and 1973), and his latest episode of Political Advertisements (1984-1996), the fourth piece dedicated to analysing election campaigns in the United States, where he has lived since the 1970s. This selection presents these twenty-five years of video work by Muntadas, a pioneer in new audiovisual and electronic media and one of the most important directors, both nationally and internationally. The programme includes all of his video work, 21 single-channel pieces organised into nine programmes arranged chronologically, allowing the viewer to follow the evolution of his interest in the context of the media, which has influenced all of his work.

The film cycle, About Federico García Lorca features the latest audiovisual pieces dedicated to the writer in Spain, as well as the few film images that have been preserved of him, interviews with family members and friends and witnesses to the intense and passionate life and work of this universal poet.

Video dance is usually linked to the origins of video and its relationship to contemporary dance, following the evolution of creators, artistic languages and the use of technology in the search for common ground where the two forms of expression complement each other in the communication of ideas and creation of emotions. However, the relationship between dance and image is not exclusive to the last quarter century; in fact, since its earliest days, a special attraction has existed between film and dance that today, after nearly one hundred years, still merits analysing.

How should Latin America be represented? Where is it? Can it be reduced to some geographical limits? Or can its space be reproduced in other spheres, like the U.S., where Latinisation is a trend that will reach its apogee in the 21^st century? The Idea of a Place is a video programme that focuses on Latin America as a space/location, an ‘absolute place’ that is the sphere of authentic nomadism, directly confronting contemporary concepts of space and location, as well as the possibility of the production/reproduction of images using technology to represent both fact and fiction. Anna Bella Geiger (Rio de Janeiro, 1933) in Mapas elementales nº 3 (1976), Louis Hock (Los Angeles, 1948) with the work The Mexican Tapes: A Chronicle of Life Outside the Law, (1986) and José Gabriel Fernández (Caracas, 1957) in Hotel Arizona are some of the artists featured.

Holland is a country that has historically been open to the outside world, not only because of the different cultures that have come together within its borders, but also because of the travelling spirit of its inhabitants. Consistent with this idiosyncrasy, video art in the Netherlands has developed within an international context since the beginning. Video Art in Holland: Two Views is a series that features a selection of the most important videos from the 1997 World Wide Video Festival, the most cosmopolitan video festival in Europe, held at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam between 12 and 17 September 1997.

Films from documenta X is a film and video programme that features a unique event in the history of the festival held in Kassel every five years: the creation of its own audiovisual programme, consisting of a group of fiction films and documentaries conceived and created at the behest of the documenta festival. This date on the art calendar has a long history, going back to 1955 when Arnold Bode, the exhibition founder, used the so-called Bode Plan to express his desire to present “foreign and national films in Kassel”. Accordingly, the first documenta featured 40 Years of Film Documents, while the series Happenings and Fluxus accompanied documenta 5. In addition to a selection of videos and an experimental film series, documenta 6 featured Cinema of the 1970s, and Parsifal (1982) by Hans Jürgen Syberberg (Nossendorf, 1935) was screened at the opening session of documenta 7. Finally, the film sequence Jazz-Boxing-Baseball formed part of documenta 9.

The Film Machine. Mechanical Metaphors in Avant-Garde Film is a series of avant-garde films from the 1920s and 1930s relating to the impact of machines on the modern world and society, from the first European abstract and futurist experiments to Soviet propaganda films and American comedies, passing through pioneering science fiction films. The aim of this combination of narrative and experimental genres is to illustrate how the world of the machine inspired both the industry and avant-garde artists. The fascination first appeared in pioneering films by the Lumière brothers, Georges Méliès (Paris, 1861-1938), Segundo de Chomón (Teruel 1871- Paris 1929) and other anonymous artists, whose work introduces this series.

The old concept of a person used to refer to oneself and to others is losing its meaning. Discourses as varied (and antagonistic) as science, religion, politics, philosophy and art indicate this movement clearly. This video programme features an orographic exploration and partial signposting of the terrain of video action, a perfect microcosm of what appears to be taking place on a different scale. Far from offering responses or interpretations, it aspires to contribute to the ruling confusion, adding new symptoms that speak equally of the generalised deterioration of these inescapably decomposing bodies.

The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía presents an anthological series divided into eight programmes on the first ten years of video as a means for artistic expression in the United States, an exhaustive look at its use in phenomenological and conceptual explorations. The First Decade in Perspective. Video Art and Alternative Media in the United States reflects attempts to establish a criticism of the North American television culture, to introduce new voices in the art world, and to capture experiments in the field of performance art, creating a new visual language.