Film and Video

The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía presents a retrospective of the work of Chip Lord (Cleveland, 1944) a pioneer in video creation in the United States and co-founder of the art and architecture collective Ant Farm, created to map the American psyche of the 1940s and 50s without losing sight of the rapid technological changes of the post-war period. The works done by Ant Farm, whose members (co-founder Doug Michels and Curtis Schreier and Hudson Marquez, who joined later) came from the field of architecture, treated the media in a way that differed significantly from other video collectives in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Decidedly interdisciplinary, the group produced works that combined performance art, media language, sculpture and graphic and architectural design and usually exhibited the countercultural ideology of the era with a free-and-easy sense of humour.

The work of Breda Beban (Serbia) - born in the former Yugoslavia and living in London since 1991 - focuses on photography, film and video. Her films are romantic reports, halfway between fiction and documentary, on the authenticity, intimacy and vulnerability found on the margins of great stories about culture, geopolitics and gender questions.

The work of David Lamelas (Buenos Aires, 1946) is unique in that it unites formal objectivism with the embodiment of the artist’s subjective experience and is marked by his time in different cities like Los Angeles, London, Paris and Berlin. This series, structured into three programmes, offers a tour through these cities as they appear in his work at different significant moments of his life between his break with Buenos Aires and his return there.

This year, Film and Almost Film presents 33 pieces, most of which were created between 2002 and 2004 by visual artists and Spanish and international filmmakers.

Stan Brakhage: in Search of the Sublime

This series is dedicated to the audiovisual work done by artists who lived near the events of 9/11 and who documented the before and after of the attack on the World Trade Center in New York on Tuesday 11 September 2001, which the world witnessed on their television screens. Since then, the unrepeatable moment that the airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center has been rebroadcast endlessly, becoming fixed in the collective memory, condensing the innumerable effects of Al Qaeda’s attack against the United States.

A Zone of Crossovers is a series dedicated to the Belgian film and video scene, a heterogeneous place where extremely different approaches, forms and strategies come together. Without a doubt, this circumstance reflects and is a symptom of the complex historical, political and cultural reality of this small country which, since its founding in 1830, has embodied a commitment to neutralise territorial conflicts between adjacent powers: Germany, England, France and Holland. The setting for historical clashes between the Latin and Germanic worlds, Belgium is also a space characterised by a rich cultural hybridisation in which the appearance of figures like René Magritte, Marcel Broodthaers and Panamarenko cannot be considered a coincidence.

Describing Love (in 7 Fragments) presents some twenty videos and seven films that, using different moments and contexts, reflect on love and are related to seven ideas taken from the book by Roland Barthes (Cherbourg, 1915 - Paris, 1980), Fragments d’un discourse amoureux. The book is structured around topics (arranged from A to Z) that the author defines both theoretically and personally. As in the book, the programme follows Barthes’ ideas in alphabetical order, as he presents them in the original French, thus questioning the linearity of the narrative of the subject’s experience and his love affair, providing a portrait (which is structural more than biographical) in which the loving subject speaks about himself in a confrontation with the loved object, who does not speak.

This series is dedicated to the work of artist, photographer and director Ulrike Ottinger (Konstanz, 1942), one of the most emblematic figures of the New German Cinema, paradoxically overlooked by official histories. Ottinger began working in film in the 1960s (during which time she studied photography, history and ethnology at the side of teachers including John Friedlaender, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Pierre Bourdieu), although she did not make her first film as a director until 1972, when she directed Laocoon & Sons with Tabea Blumenschein (Konstanz, 1952). The film premiered at the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin in 1973. With Madame X - Eine absolute Herrscherin (1977), a film about a female pirate, Ottinger revealed her interest in questions of gender, although in the 1980s she distanced herself from traditional feminist paradigms to interrogate the existence of a ‘female’ aesthetic, an alternative way of seeing the world, and begin to explore new discourses about identity. Her Berlin Trilogy marked a critical moment in this turn, since in it she tackled questions like androgyny and dandyism using a somewhat queer sensibility. From this point of view, Ottinger’s work has the special distinction of re-appropriating the aesthetics of narcissism from a feminist discourse, proposing a renegotiation of subjectivity and going beyond the more traditional debates in feminist theory on gender and sexuality.

Manuel Olveira (Puerto del Son, 1964), the director de Hangar, talks about the project Procesos abiertos, which was designed to draw attention to the production processes in contemporary art through a series of activities, a documentation centre and a blog. For six months (from January to July 2004) and with the participation of eleven artists, a support framework will be created in and with the public space, intended to be more of a network of relationships within a context than a physical framework.

Valie Export (Linz, 1940) has, since the 1960s, served as a reference point for conceptual and feminist art with her reflections on identity, the use of the body and sexuality and its relation to the media. Her work, which is formally heterogeneous, spans film, video, performance art, photography, drawing and installations, formats that converge in a point of view that is radically opposed to the roles that the sexist conception inherent in western culture grants women.

Originally, hacker was a word that designated someone who made furniture using an axe. In the cyber world, however, it has acquired numerous meanings related to the world of artificial intelligence and its uses on the Internet, from the positive connotation when referring to a person who enjoys exploring programmable systems in great detail and how to expand their possibilities, to the unfavourable meaning used to refer to people who maliciously try to discover delicate information by manipulating programming systems. Hackers. The Art of Abstraction is a series of documentaries, conferences and performance pieces dedicated to the hacker phenomenon and culture that highlights some key questions that arose alongside the earliest appearances of computer ‘piracy’: Are the security systems guaranteed by large corporations and web servers really stable? To what extent can hacker practices be categorised as meaningless vandalism? What lies in these practices of civil disobedience?

What is the tunche? The tunche is a figure that has never been seen but is there. No visual representation of it exists, but it is imagined as a nocturnal bird. Its whistle is sweet and melancholy. When its whistle is short, it is a tormented soul that escorts; when it is long, it is an evil spirit that haunts, an omen of misfortune and death. Part of Peruvian folklore, the tunche is a feared and respected presence in the collective mindset.

This film and video programme presents the complete filmography of the Vietnamese filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha (Hanoi, 1952), one of the most forceful voices in post-colonial and post-feminist discourse in the 1980s and 90s. Born in Hanoi, she moved to the United States in 1970, where she studied music composition, ethnomusicology and French literature at the University of Illinois. Her film work has been highly recognised in the field of documentary, where she has adopted a critical ethnographic eye with respect to the narrative of the traditional documentary, which she deconstructs in her films. The technique of documentary film often contains the illusion of offering an objective and impartial look at the observed subject. The filmmaker, like the anthropologist, usually enjoys a privileged position, a distance above the observed subject that supposedly guarantees the neutrality of the process and the document. Part of Trinh T. Minh-ha’s work consists of challenging this proposition, revealing the strategies and methods used in the specific relationships between the documentary maker and the exploited or oppressed subjects who are observed in a hieratical power structure with an underlying authoritarian discourse about the ‘other’. In her films, meaning is constructed, not given. Thus she shows that commentary is not impartial, but rather an interpretation open to all its inherent complexity.