Film and Video

In this lecture, theorist and experimental cinema historian P. Adams Sitney (New Haven, Connecticut, 1944) will discuss the nature and history of experimental American film in the second half of the twentieth century.

In Portugal António Reis (1927–1991) is regarded a visionary, a master who had a major influence on the awakening of Portuguese cinema after Salazar’s dictatorship and on a new generation of film-makers in the 1980s and 1990s. Alongside his wife, psychologist Margarida Cordeiro (1939), he directed four films, shot in a new lyrical and hypnotic language. These films are presented in this film series with Manoel de Oliveira’s film Rite of Spring, on which Reis worked as assistant director and which denoted the beginnings of ethnographic and poetic film-making.

In conjunction with the film series The Eye in Matter. Dziga Vertov and Early Soviet Cinema, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía in collaboration with Filmoteca Española, the artist and film-maker Peter Kubelka will conduct a workshop on filmic creation, centred on debate and experimentation. The workshop will see Kubelka present and debate his work with the audience.

Adam Curtis reveals the way power works, its meandering architecture, the ideas that configure it, the agents and institutions involved, the way it is etched into contemporary geopolitics, into us. Power reverberates through one of the most lucid and revealing bodies of work in recent times, part of which is the focus of this film series. The films, remastered in new versions, are complemented with a masterclass, two sessions with carte blanche, ‘blank pages’, and a series of presentations.

Part retrospective and part recontextualization, this series presents a number of Vertov’s feature films and selections from his early chronicles, together with documentaries from the early soviet cinema.

How do the film-makers negotiate the paradoxical side of the painting, between allegory and index? What are the different ‘Guernicas’ that appear in these four essay films?

This series presents the filmic actions, imaginaries and productions of  the Tricontinental, a collaboration between Global South countries during the period of decolonisation and emancipation in the 1960s and 1970s. A cosmopolitan surge of activity interspersed and  circulated hitherto national and fragmentary debates over the so-called Third Cinema and the New European cinemas, constructing an alter-global network involving film-makers such as Glauber Rocha, Ruy Guerra, Leon Hirszman, Humberto Solás, Santiago Álvarez, Ousmane Sembène, Sarah Maldoror and Masao Adachi.

The so-called “refugee crisis” has pervaded Western screens, showing death in the Mediterranean and the exodus through Europe as a major humanitarian catastrophe. This series looks at how artists and film-makers in Europe and the Middle East have reacted to the situation, reflecting on the implications of its visibility and the strategies for responding to what is shown.

Argentinian artist David Lamelas’ incorporation of the notion of duration and real time into different mediums is one of the most profound. This programme brings together the entire Time as Activity film series, in which the artist has recorded different cities at specific times, starting in 1969 and running up to the present day. The series interweaves the phenomenology of art from 1960 with the continuous, global and hyperconnected time of the intangible economy.

This series shows the films of Marcel Broodthaers as a sum of contradictions from which to understand his work as a whole, and develops the reasons for the medium’s privileged place, its investigation and filmic imaginary in contemporary art after 1970.

Within the framework of the programme Intervalos, Museo Reina Sofía screens Political Advertisement IX 1952–2016, an audiovisual project by artists Antoni Muntadas and Marshall Reese, to be shown in the run-up to the U.S. presidential elections.

Museo Reina Sofía presents, in collaboration with Filmoteca Española, a comprehensive retrospective on the film-makers Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. The series, comprising works spanning from 1962 to the present day, reflects one of the most cohesive and relevant film projects in the 20^th century, whereby cinema is both an artistic form and a way of politically bursting forth in the present. Engaging in dialogue with Jean-Marie Straub, the series includes new translations of the vast majority of the films, original format screenings, remastered copies, a significant number of premieres in Spain, and a new publication featuring essays on the film-makers.       

The Intervalos (Intermissions) programme, which shows screenings of recent film work, presents a preview of Andrés Duque’s latest movie, Oleg and Strange Arts. The film moves between biography and performance, bearing witness, through moments in the life of Russian composer Oleg Karavaychuk (1927–2016), to the return of beauty that is at once eccentric, fragile and pathological.

The open-air cinema is closely linked to summer holidays: a space and time where the working class is freed from work obligations and where the chance for enjoyment and leisure presents itself. This series, screened on the outdoor terraces of the Museo, offers a journey through the history of the medium, focusing on its relationship with the conception of holidaying, leisure, travel and tourism, through which a whole range of ideas and questions that surface at this intersection are analysed.

Museo Reina Sofía presents this retrospective film-program dedicated to Cuban documentary movement around the Revolution, an Avant-garde episode in Latin America usually ignored. Together with the impulse to show a new reality and rethink the public function of the image, the documentary in Cuba merges the factual record with the aesthetics of shock and agitation of the montage, producing a unique visual manifesto.