Film and Video

Specters: A Ciné-politics of Haunting gathers a selection of recent international film and video that conjures the hauntings of our collective cultural imaginary. Some phantoms arise from past injustices and political traumas, some apparitions, of catastrophic times to come.

This film season continues a series of programmes that have addressed the change to structures, narrations and methods of film-making in recent Spanish cinema. With three editions to date, The Memory of Disrepute develops, through double sessions, how other cinema invents its own genealogy, exercising a discontinuous and partisan history of recent cinema.

This programme presents pop confronting pop, recognising the seduction of consumer culture whilst also keeping it at a critical distance. In relation to the exhibition devoted to Richard Hamilton, this series approaches the popular as subversion and as an investigation into the characteristics of a new society that emerged between the 1950s and 1970s.

Active in the UK between 1982 and 1997, the Black Audio Film Collective symbolised a radical attempt to transform education, institutions and the representation of black identity in independent film, with their work condensing a complex palimpsest of voices that, found between nascent politics of representation, put forward a language of diaspora.

Premiere of the recent documentary about Hélio Oiticica. Put together as a living archive of numerous unpublished documents, from the artist’s thoughts as a narrative guide to unexplored audiovisual fragments, the film looks to articulate a complex and multiple narrative of the artist and the post-war Avant-garde movement in Brazil.

As part of the Intervalos programme, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi’s latest work is screened, with both film-makers also participating at an encounter. Joining film practices based on found footage, documentary and experimental cinema, Pays Barbare is a complex tale about historical memory, fascism and colonialism.

Cinema is a privileged medium in the narrative construction of biography, yet, in the face of narcissism from the mythologies of self, this film series shows life in its temporary form, both fragile and precarious, and presents a programme that spans from Neorealism to recent post-colonial cinema.

This is the premiere of the film-maker’s most recent production, which coincides with the exhibition and film program devoted to his work. Shot in one single take, Ana Arabia demonstrates the utopian coexistence of a community of Jews and Muslims as they withstand urban speculation.

With a filmography that contains theatrical parody and documentary realism in equal proportions, Kaurismäki’s cinema is based on the paradoxes and fault lines of contemporaneity. This retrospective, the first to be held in a modern art museum, is complemented by a master class and a carte blanche program chosen by the filmmaker. 

The cinema of Amos Gitai is that of an architect-filmmaker, but it is also that of a biographer-filmmaker. Organised in connection with the exhibition The Biographies of Amos Gitai, this series spans over 30 years of activity and points to the historical strata underlying the conflict between Israel and Palestine.   

AIDS Anarchive began within the framework of the 2012-2013 research residencies at Museo Reina Sofía, as part of the production process of a “counter-archive” or an anarchive of AIDS policies, with attention being paid for the first time to practices occurring outside of the Anglo-Saxon or Western and Central European settings.

In this performative lecture, in parallel with the presentation of Minimal Resistance. Between late modernism and Globalisation: artistic practices during the 80s and 90s, Mullican reviews and comments on some of his performances under hypnosis, in which he recreates, as he does in his visual works, the logic of an unstable and irrational world.

This audiovisual series looks at the 1980s, and that decade’s prolongation into the 1990s, as a genealogy of much of the dialectics that explain contemporary, as a time period and cultural category.

Film on the margins, from the peripheries, and the other cinema are among the terms used to refer to works that have been made outside the industry in recent years in Spain. Beyond this condition of existence, a number of additional criteria are fulfilled by these films, suggesting something of a group identity. More specifically: independent production and distribution platforms, the incorporation of the experimental language used in the field of art (exhibition video and film) and the liberal use of documentary techniques in the form of essay film are some of the features found throughout this other cinema.

In recent years, it has been pointed out that one of the identifying features of Spanish alternative film is the exploration of the real.

News from Ideological Antiquity: Marx/Eisenstein/Capital (2008) is one of the most complex and monumental films of recent film history. Throughout the almost nine hours that the film lasts, its director, Alexander Kluge (Germany, 1932), offers his own construction of Eisenstein's unfinished project of filming Capital by Karl Marx, an idea conceived after a feverish encounter between the Russian filmmaker and James Joyce in 1927.

This audiovisual series looks at Salvador Dalí's film, video and television production, as a culmination of the exhibition Dalí. All of the poetic suggestions and all of the plastic possibilities. Almost five hours in length, this collection of works, with repeat screenings over two days, argues that the relationship between Dalí and mass culture is key to understanding the artist's work, but also to developing a different idea of modernity, one that conveys the spectacular and tumultuous nature of 1930s modernity. 

This summer film series explores one of the contemporary cinematographies that, although very interesting, is among the least distributed in Europe. Midway between new auteur voices and the poetics of documentary, this series shows how film responds to a situation of provisionality and how it imagines the future from the vantage point of uncertainty.

With his films, Harun Farocki (Czech Republic, 1944) dissects the control, representation and value systems derived from capital and its images. This event, the first of the Intervalos program, shows two recent works, one of which was produced by Museo Reina Sofía, and also includes a lecture by Thomas Elsaesser. 

Eduardo Coutinho (São Paulo, 1933) is an essential name in Latin American documentary film. His work is shaped by political issues but manages to avoid propaganda, as he addresses the everyday lives and subjectivities of marginal majorities with a sensibility not altered by melodrama. This retrospective, the most extensive to date, presents a body of work that ranges from the context of Cinema Novo to the analysis of fiction in contemporary film.

The friction of bodies is a film and video series that presents a broad panorama of different artistic and political manifestations from the 1980s, which arose during and co-existed with the years of repression in Latin America. Many of these videos and films, most of which have never been shown publicly outside of their original contexts, demonstrate the emergency of new political subjects and forms of subcultural participation. The program also includes recent film proposals that look back at the agitated times of the 1980s in this context, to offer different readings or to activate a memory still throbbing within us.

This collection offers a broad vision of how some of the audiovisuals now being made in Spain and produced outside of the industry are responding to today's situation of change and structural crisis. It also shows how documentary images constitute one of the most lively spheres for formal experimentation and essay film in the new systems of production and distribution.

In his 1936 essay, The Artwork in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility, Walter Benjamin uses the Blaue Blume—the romantic incarnation of unobtainable desire—to signify the artifice and perceived immediacy of film made possible through the concealment of the cinematic apparatus.

The presence of film in the successive re-readings of Museo Reina Sofía Collection alludes to the crisis in the distinction between hierarchies and artistic narrations, but it also points to the idea that a collection involves a network of stories, memories and times that are inseparable from film practice.

All About Love, a title borrowed from the film of the same name made by Ann Hui (Anshan, 1947), sums up the subject matter of this Chinese filmmaker's work, which usually revolves around social and personal relationships and has a great deal of affective and emotional content.

How to give feminist film its own voice against the conventions of classic film and how to maintain the subaltern nature of this voice?

This series presents a number of videos and performances that have arisen out of contemporary feminist, queer/cuir and "transmarikabollo" (Spanish slang term for LGBT) practices situated within the tradition of guerrilla video: exercises in appropriation of lightweight mass media as counter-information media, but also as dissident gender and sexuality production techniques.

At the end of 1950, Jorge Oteiza concluded his investigations in the field of sculpture but, far from fading away, his aesthetic interests continued in a different sphere, one previously unexplored by him: film.

Brazilian cinema back then was not just film, it was something more: cinema of invention, Quasi-cinema, experimental cinema, barbaric cinema, bad taste cinema, Boca do Lixo, Cinema Marginal, udigrudi, pornochanchada. These are the expressions used by both critics and by the artists and filmmakers themselves to describe an important part of the film production of those years.