Programma Studium Generale 2011

INTRODUCTION

“The Godardian ‘flash’ might well embody the indiscernibility of two procedures, since it is at the same time a break and a link. It is a signal of disconnection and the light of another world. Connecting one shot to another, a shot to a phrase, fresco, song, political speech, newsreel image or advertisement, etc., still means both staging a clash and framing a continuum. The time-space of the clash and the time-space of the continuum have, in fact, the same name: History. Disconnecting images from stories, Godard assumes, is connecting them so as to make History."

Jacques Rancière

Now that we are eleven years into the 21st century, and our North African and Middle Eastern colleagues and contemporaries fight, win and propagate their battles on Tahrir Square and elsewhere, armed with nothing more than their mobile phones, we sit in class at art school and ask ourselves questions about the end of ‘cinema’ as the most engaged art form of the 20th century. Now that mainstream film production rules the waves on private flat screens and Blue- ray players, while experimental cinema increasingly has to take refuge in ‘black boxes’ at biennials and other gatherings of the art world, we wonder how we can understand a new generation’s fascination with the Nouvelle Vague. Can we still learn from or use Godardian cinematographic techniques like ‘montage’? Are we nostalgic for the authority of the director as a mediator of the revolution because we are unable to deal creatively with the ‘undisciplined’ democratic power of the new media?

We propose ‘CINEMA CLASH CONTINUUM, Film and History in the Age of Godard’ as a modus operandi for extensive reflection on Jean-Luc Godard’s films and those of many others, the cinematic medium in itself, its relation to ‘history’ and its connection with social media and contemporary artistic practices.

From 28.March to 1.April, a team of 11 curators will present their burning questions and musings to the students and the faculty of the Rietveld Academie as well as to the general public. Together with forty-five guest speakers from all over the world, we are ready to embark on this energetic explorative journey. The results will be published in the CCCCahier which is 
to be launched during the period of final exams at 
the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in July 2011.

Monday

Cinema Clash Continuum: A space to move in

Opening Lectures & Book Launch

For the kick-off to our week long quest for a better understanding of the workings of film, art, space and time we have brought together four influential voices, three very much alive and one whose words are remarkably alive in spite of his untimely death in 1992. The four independent presentations which start off Cinema Clash Continuum are the markers of just as many crucial positions on film and history that we will seek to unfold. First, there is that of the visual artist reinventing traditional film techniques. In “Your Life Was A Film” Mark Lewis will talk about his work — with particular emphasis on rear projection and day-for-night — as well as the idea of a kind of modernity that is unintentionally produced in film.

Secondly we have invited cultural theorist Boris Buden to compare French New Wave and Yugoslav Black Wave. In his lecture ‘Waves in Space and Time’ he will argue that these New Waves share a clear idea about space and time in filmmaking. Space for them was society; time was history.
Can we really understand this today, we who have squeezed both society and history into a single time-space called culture where there are styles to be created and followed but no waves to bring us to an undiscovered shore?

The third position will be represented by political filmmaker Eyal Sivan who will reflect on Godard's impact in the context of the Palestinian question, which Godard saw as the continuation of the European Jewish's question and which is often present in his work. Some call it an obsession, while others have accused him of anti-Semitism. For Palestinian filmmakers he is a political and revolutionary colleague, for their Israeli counterparts he is an experimental European artist. Eyal Sivan will try to read some of the iconic and controversial cinematic moments in Godard's oeuvre concerning the Palestinian-Jewish question. He will look at his anti-Zionism and his fascination with Palestine and the Semites in the context of contemporary cinema production in Palestine and Israel.

Our fourth presentation is dedicated to the late Serge Daney who, in the words of Godard, “was the end of criticism as I understood it”. Serge Daney has a guru-like status among cinephiles. He was reared on the French New Wave and began writing for Cahiers du Cinéma in 1964. His outlook on things, however, was much broader. He was one of the first to include non-Western cinema in his criticism, and in the 1980s he began to contribute articles on television, advertising and the new media to, among others, the newspaper Libération. A recurring theme in his writing is the issue of the politics of filmmaking: what point of view does 
the filmmaker choose to literally and figuratively confront the viewer with images of the world?

Timetable Monday

13.30 – 15.00
Mark Lewis ‘Your Life Was A Film’

15:00 – 15.30
Break

15.30 – 17.30
Boris Buden, Waves in Space and Time

17:30 – 19:30
DINNER AND A MOVIE    
Jacques Rivette, Le Veilleur (Claire Denis, 1990) with Serge Daney and Jacques Rivette

19:30 – 21:00
Eyal Sivan, Godard’s Time Line: 1939 – 1949 — From Europe to Palestine and back.

21:00 – 21.15
Break

21:15 – 22.15
A presentation on the occasion of the launch of two books by and on Serge Daney.    
Pieter van Bogaert will introduce the writings of Serge Daney and moderate a discussion between Eyal Sivan, Boris Buden and himself on the location of a contemporary 'space' for imagination, resistance and reflection.


22.30
END OF PROGRAM

Tuesday - program 1

Totally Against Godard Politics!

Rewriting History with Jonas Mekas & the Underground Cinema

What can we learn about cinema and history if we decide not to start from the bright ideas of Jean-Luc Godard, but rather choose a conflicting point of departure? In ‘Totally Against Godard Politics’, we explore the power of cinema from the viewpoint of the experimental filmmaker, journalist, poet, and collector Jonas Mekas.

We kick off with a short interview on video in which Jonas Mekas clarifies his troublesome relation with Godard and firmly states that he is “totally against Godard politics”. In the lectures, screenings, and discussions that follow we will try to find out what his own views on filmmaking amount to, and in which direction his attitude of experimental freedom leads us. We are extremely pleased that some of Jonas Mekas’s close friends are willing to contribute to the program, and that we are able to do a full screening of the documentary Free Radicals. It is an exciting documentary on the history of experimental cinema that was released only a few months ago. The program highlights Jonas Mekas, and also pays attention to a range of filmmakers and artists who are in one way or the other related to him.

What should you know about our main protagonist? Jonas Mekas was born in Lithuania in 1922. After spending the war in a German labor camp, he moved to New York in 1949. There he continued to write poetry and started filming his own daily life. He soon became a thriving force in the art scene, writing about and supporting the avant-garde, working with Andy Warhol and George Maciunas, founding institutions, and developing his own filmmaking into an extremely personal, erratic home movie style. The Anthology Film Archives, which he co-founded in 1970, is the first museum devoted entirely to film as art, and houses the largest collection of avant-garde and experimental film in the world. At the age of 88 Jonas Mekas is now recognized as a filmmaker and artist of classical stature whose experiments show the most intriguing strategies suitable for capturing history by way of staying as close as possible to everyday life.

Timetable Tuesday - Program 1

13.30 – 13.45
Interview Jonas Mekas, video

13.45 – 15.00
In the Shadow of the Light, lecture Sarah Payton and Chris Teerink 

15:00 – 15.30
Break  

15.30 – 16.45
The Poetry of Everyday Life, 
lecture P. Adams Sitney

17.00 – 18.30
Free Radicals: a history of experimental cinema (Pip Chodorov, 2010, 82”), screening in presence of the director

18:30 – 20:15
DINNER BREAK

20.15 – 21.15
Selection of films and fragments by Jonas Mekas

21.15 – 22.00
Discussion with Sarah Payton, P. Adams Sitney, Pip Chodorov, and Chris Teerink, moderated by Gideon Bachmann

22.00 – 22.30
Jonas (Gideon Bachmann, 1967, 30’)

22.30
END OF PROGRAM

Tuesday - program 2

Cinema – this, Television – that


“There are doubles, doubles everywhere. There are doubles everywhere.” Corinne Gambi in Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s 
Polyphonic Stage (2004)

In a program consisting of lectures, screenings, discussions and a live script reading, ‘Cinema – This, Television – That’ will reflect on ideas of temporal simultaneity, shared authorship, acting and being, presenting and becoming public or becoming image. How are production and performance articulated in cinema and in television? Can television as a supposedly ‘democratic medium’ successfully open up a space for different voices in the public sphere?

In the 1970s Jean-Luc Godard expanded on his ideas on television and its contextual and material differences with cinema in his work with his wife, 
filmmaker Anne-Marie Miéville and their Sonimage production company. They wrote on difference in spectatorship, addressing two very different public spheres:

“A. In a cinema people are many (together) to be alone in front of the screen. 
B. In an apartment linked to a TV aerial people are alone to the many (together) in front of the screen.”

Numéro Deux (1975) was the first production in which video was deliberately used to develop ideas on these two modes of reception. Film theorist Kaja Silverman describes how Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville made video an integral part of their film:

“Most of [the images] were shot in video, then reshot in 35mm as they played on video monitors. Often two monitors are shown together. Because the 35mm image is always larger than the video images, those images swim in a pool of blackness.”

The film’s specific form draws attention to its making process and allows the viewer to associate narratives that are presented simultaneously. Collapsing into spatial and temporal doubles, Numéro Deux centers on television’s influence on the domestic life of a working class family. The use of video material suggests the private sphere, the real and the amateurish, even though we are presented with staged and acted scenes.
Following a screening of Numéro Deux, Ruth Noack and Wendelien van Oldenborgh will put issues forward for discussion raised by the film about production, agency and authorship. Sven Lütticken will consider what makes up the properties of a televisual performance. Jean Fisher will speak on issues of setting and the inclusion of the audience in a video installation by James Coleman. Snejanka Mihaylova will muse on theatricality in the visual arts.

Timetable - Tuesday Program 2

13.30 – 13.45
Welcome

13.45 – 14.45
Keynote lecture by Sven Lütticken: Performance after Television (followed with Q & A)

14:45 – 15.30
Break 

15.30 – 17.00
Screening Numéro Deux (Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville, 1975)

 17.00 – 17.45 
 Response to Numéro Deux by 
Ruth Noack with Wendelien van 
Oldenborgh 

17:45 – 18.30 
Lecture by Snejanka Mihaylova: 
Not As If (followed with Q & A)

18:30 – 20:30
DINNER AND A MOVIE
Punishment Park 
(Peter Watkins, 1971)

20:30 – 21:15
Keynote lecture by Jean Fisher : 
On James Coleman's ‘So Different’ And Yet', 1980’ and after (followed with Q & A)

21:15 – 22:30
Live script reading from a script by Wendelien van Oldenborgh
Continuous program in room 217: Abertura (1979) and Terra em Transe (1967) by Glauber Rocha

22.30
END OF PROGRAM

Wednesday - program 1

Cinema & Society

Where have the Subversives gone?

This may seem an outdated question. But in an age 
of global unrest, growing control and command by the State, and a stifling grip of the mainstream consensus culture, filmmakers may wonder if they can be subversive at all. It may be that the requirements of protest result in the sacrifice of originality and artistic inventiveness. Is that too high a price for a filmmaker to pay? Our path leads to a rare cinematic spirit which deals with the society's ‘in-betweens', quietly, without announcing it.

“In these great times, which I knew when they were small’Let him who has something to say step forward and be silent” — Karl Kraus (1914)

Engagement is now a problem for all the arts.
We'll start by looking at the visual arts. In BAVO's ‘Too Active to Act', they wipe the floor with Dutch neo-liberal cultural policy. They claim that artists have become ‘cultural therapists' and ‘conflict managers' with neighbourhood projects that camouflage the real issues of vandalism and property speculation. Can BAVO provide an alternative and tell artists how to avoid falling into the trap of the creative masquerading as social solution?

Artist Jonas Staal places himself in the eye of the storm. His ‘The Geert Wilders Works' led to his two-day imprisonment and to his next two works: ‘The Geert Wilders Work — A Trial I – II'. ‘The Barack Obama Project' displays an ingenious concept combining an original visual language with questions 
of political correctness regarding race. We will ask the artist why he refuses to call his works ironic (one work is actually entitled ‘Against Irony').
Can artistic practice be critical and subversive operating within the the sphere of the conceptual, discursive and political? Transparency and autonomy of art must be addressed. After the zenith of conceptual art, what is the role and necessity of theory? Miodrag Šuvaković considers whether there is now any difference between theory and practice within the context of artistic subversion.
Lech Kowalski's BORN TO LOSE: THE LAST ROCK AND ROLL MOVIE is a monument to Punk culture and independent filmmaking. The cinema of Lech Kowalski has flourished with the rise and fall of the last subversive movement — Punk. Did he identify himself with that counterculture? Knowing that MTV awaits its chance to absorb anything, does it matter to the free-spirited filmmaker where his films are shown? Kowalski's portraits of former terrorists and of prostitutes in Eastern Europe reveal a deep concern with those marginalized. However, does the fact that films on issues big and small are everywhere on the Internet actually help to sensitize an audience to society's lost causes?

Timetable Wednesday Program 1

13.30 – 13.45
 Introduction by Stefan Majakowski: from the Arts to Punk to the Cinema 
of Lech Kowalski

13.45 – 14.15
Presentation by BAVO

14.15 – 14.45
Presentation by Jonas Staal

14.45 – 15.15
 Presentation by Miodrag Šuvaković

 15.15 – 16.10
 Discussion with BAVO, Jonas Staal and Miodrag Šuvaković moderated by Stefan Majakowski: methods of artist's intervention, artistic criteria regarding the place of art and possible protest within the neo-liberal landscape

 16.10 – 16.30
 BREAK 

 16.30 – 18.30
 Presentation by Lech Kowalski. The filmmaker discusses various aspects of his cinema (Subject matter, form and context) using film fragments

 18.30 – 20.15
DINNER

20.15 – 22.30
 Introduction to and screening of Born to Lose: the Last Rock and Roll Movie (Lech Kowalski, 100 min, 1999)
Discussion with Lech Kowalski and the audience

22.30
END OF PROGRAM

Wednesday - program 2

Tout Va Bien

Self-Reflexivity and Cinéma Verité

Is Tout Va Bien just the ‘making of' Tout Va Bien, or is it something more? In 1972 Godard set out to make a film about 1968. Marxist integrity inspired him to turn the camera on the film's own production means and process. In the opening scene checks are already being signed to signal the birth of the film, and stars are presented as a mechanism to ensure commercial success. This self-reflexivity is a new artistic turn in the history of cinema.
Handheld cameras, street-filming, unrehearsed acting, a deliberate stripping down of the artifices of mainstream filmmaking had for ten years been a trademark feature of the Nouvelle Vague cinema, with Godard as its main figure. Their direct methods of filming were inspired by the cinéma-vérité of Jean Rouch, an anthropologist who filmed possession rituals in Africa in the 1950s with very basic portable equipment. In JAGUAR, Jean Rouch collaborates with the local people, making them play themselves in everyday life. Later, in MOI, UN NOIR (1955) the ‘actors' choose to assume the identities of film stars in their daily life, creating what he calls ‘ethno-fiction'.
In this seminar I will compare these two filmmakers: the Godard of TOUT VA BIEN and the ROUCH OF MOI, UN NOIR, their political ideas and ambitions, and their reflections on film as an instrument for dealing with reality in a paradoxical way. They have opposite ways of mixing documentary with fiction, of associating the glamour of cinema with the life of exploited workers. In both cases it seems as if the director has somehow handed over his leading position to all the protagonists: cinema is looking at itself, the film is just making itself!

A few decades later, self-reflexivity is at the core of the exploration of any new medium, between self-centered investigation and political truthfulness towards the viewer. A new attitude has been created which would later become a cornerstone for any new medium of communication. From its inception Net Art resorted to similar tools of self-reflexivity by exposing its own puppet strings: a browser window within a browser window, etc.

Artists invited to this seminar will share their experiences in self-reflexive research within their own medium, showing examples of this in their own works, and outlining their personal motives and political strategies against the backdrop of this moment in the history of cinema. Some will even take the opportunity for an instant workshop with students to create a small film or an online performance ‘on the fly'.

Timetable Wednesday Program 2

13:30 – 13:45 
Presentation of the seminar by Martine Neddam, with short excerpts from the film Tout va Bien

13:45 – 14:45
Self-Reflexivity in Net Art: from Ping Body to Suicide Machine, a panorama of self-reflexive practices in net cultures by Josephine Bosma

14:45 – 15:45 
Conference / Demo: Huis Clos / No Exit by Annie Abrahams

15:45 – 16:15 
Break  
with slide show by Praneet Soi

16:15 – 17:15 
 Lecture on political imagery in the media and video presentation by Praneet Soi

17:15 – 18:15
Calin Dan: Anturaju and Other Stories. About Language as Prison and Escape

18:15 – 20:15 
DINNER AND A MOVIE    

Moi, Un Noir (Jean Rouch, 1958) 

 20:15 – 21:15 
Michael Uwemedino on Rouch, Godard, and the film collective Vision Machine

21:15 – 22:30
Conclusion: Panel discussion with 
participants

22.30
END OF PROGRAM

Thursday - program 1

Quasi-Cinema

Deviant Forms of Representation

When Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica* was living in New York during the 1970s, he created a series of experimental films and slideshows that questioned the language of cinema. Described by him as ‘Quasi-cinemas', these were multimedia participatory installations that placed the spectator within an almost [quasi] cinematic montage: Against a background of music compositions by Stockhausen, samba and bossa nova melodies, and songs by Jimi Hendrix, there were simultaneous slide projections in which the portraits of Luis Buñuel, Marilyn Monroe and Hendrix appeared while tribal drawings made of cocaine were being applied on their faces. To view these works, the spectators were invited to take place in hammocks, on mattresses or even in a swimming pool, challenging the traditional ‘passive' relationship between the screen and the audience thus instigating other social, corporal and sensual relationships between the people and the films or artworks.
Using a reenacted appropriation of one of Oiticica's Quasi-cinema installations as a platform, a number of international scholars, artists and film curators will discuss other experimental cinematographic positions of directors who subverted traditionalist forms of gender and sexual representation on the screen. The subjects to be discussed within this program will touch upon the relationships between film, marginality and counter-culture. The first part of the program will have cultural studies theoretician Victor Manuel Rodriguez speaking directly on the queer politics behind the work of Helio Oiticica; film curator Marc Siegel will screen and talk on underground filmmaker Jack Smith's controversial featurette FLAMING CREATUTES (1963), and writer Juan Antonio Suarez will talk about the Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars in Andy Warhol's films.

The second part of program will further expand on the cultural specificity of gender and sexual representation in cinema. For this artist Ming Wong will share his work which deals with the theatricality of identity and race as he reenacts iconic scenes from movies by Douglas Sirk, Pier Paolo Pasolini and legendary Malay director P. Ramlee; while trans-gender historian Susan Stryker will screen and discuss excerpts of an obscure and campy archival treasure — a 1962 film from the Philippines featuring U.S. transsexual celebrity Christine Jorgensen, who was then performing 
an extended run at a Manila nightclub.

Artist Helio Oitica has a special relation with Dutch art history because of two non-related historic moments: On the one hand, his work may well be the outcome of a conscious appropriation of De Stijl. On the other hand, the Witte de With 1992 Helio Oiticica retrospective is still the most comprehensive overview of the artist's work to date.

Timetable Thursday - program 1

14.00 – 15.15
Talk by Victor Manuel Rodriguez on Helio Oiticica's Quasi-cinemas

15.15 – 15.40
BREAK 

15.40 – 16.00
Talk by Marc Siegel on Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures (1963)

16.00 – 17.15
Talk by Juan Antonio Suarez on the 
Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars of Andy Warhol's cinema

17.15 – 18.30
Discussion between Victor Manuel Rodriguez, Marc Siegel and by Juan Antonio Suarez. Moderated by Inti Guerrero

18.30 – 20.15
DINNER

20.15 – 21.20
Talk by Susan Stryker Discussion on the Philippine movie We Who Are Sexy (Kaming Mga Talyada), 1962


21.20 – 22.30
Artist presentation by Ming Wong. 
Reenacting and Subverting; or how 
to cross-dress identity of film history

22.30
END OF PROGRAM

Thursday - program 2

Give me a brain!

Clash Continuum Senses of Cerebral Screens

In the Nouvelle Vague period Godard's cinema of the body was opposed to the “cinema of the brain” of his contemporary Alain Resnais. Give me a Brain! (a reference to Gilles Deleuze) takes as its starting point Resnais' intellectual cinema and cerebral explorations of memory and human behavior, but will investigate more specifically our changed relationship to the brain. In contemporary cinema we no longer look through the characters' eyes, we enter directly into the architecture of their brain worlds. Contemporary culture has become a neuroculture. The program will investigate what this ‘neurological turn' means for our understanding of filmic and artistic practices.

fMRI scans and many other visualization technologies have given new insights into the inner workings of the brain. New experiments and countless books about the brain uncover new neurological details every day. We know more about the material workings of our grey cells than ever before, yet its mechanisms and circuits are far more complex than we can understand un-ambiguously. Our synaptic connections remain in many ways a mystery. And we are still puzzled by the ways in which immaterial mental life overflows the material workings of the brain.Compared to the classic conception of the brain as rational agent (as opposed to the irrational body), the contemporary image of the brain has become visceral, emotional and has madness as its zero degree. Illusionary perception, memory, affect, and the powers of the unconscious mind are the most salient elements of our modern brain screens that will be explored in this program. Can we speak of a neurocinema, neuroaesthetics and neuropower and what does this mean? Is the neuro-turn just a hype that is easily exploitable or is it possible to engage critically, passionately, creatively with these new cerebral findings?

Today the Rietveld building will be turned into a large brain space. Different ‘chambers' will present different areas of the brain in which artists, filmmakers, neuroscientists, philosophers and a mentalist present work in relation to the specific area of the brain that each chamber addresses. Come and join us on a ride through our mental scapes and screens in ‘brainy' lectures, viewings, performances, installations, workshops and discussions!

Timetable Thursday - program 2

13.30 – 13.45
Introduction by Patricia Pisters

13.45 – 14.30
The Artistic Eye and Brain: From Camera Obscura to Obscure Chambers, lecture by Frans Verstraten 

14.30 – 15.00
The Tactile Screen: Digitizing the Brain in Art and Science, lecture by Sarah de Rijcke

15.00 – 15.30
BREAK

15.30 – 17.00
Semi-Parallel Brain Chambers Program 

(Detailed program to be handed out during the day)

17.00 – 18.00
Inception: The Brain under Hypnosis, 
a demonstration by Fernando Flores

18.00 – 18.45
Coney Island Dream Films — films by Zoe Beloff

18.45 – 20.15
DINNER

20.15 – 21.00
Neuropower lecture by Warren Neidich

21.00 – 22.30
Final Brainstorm, a panel discussion with guests and audience

22.30
END OF PROGRAM

Friday - program 1

Cinema Degree Zero

In many ways cinema is a language just like any other written language, except that it is based on images, which allows it to enjoy greater freedom. But if all other languages or art forms have made efforts to find their own limits and transgress them, how has cinema found itself increasingly narrowed down to fit tightly into the myriad of unspoken rules of Hollywood story-telling? Today it seems that cinema has exhausted its formula. And the new cinema of technological extension, which blindly embraces things like 3-D or youtube ‘virals', mostly results in mediocrity — at best. Once the glamour wears off it is usually revealed that they are actually only an expansion of a radically conservative/banal concept of art.

Qu'est-ce que le cinéma? What are the real properties of cinema? In the early 1970s Jean-Luc Godard had exhausted the possibilities of narrative cinema, which he felt had become nothing more than a bad imitation of theatre (or what Alfred Hitchcock called “radio with pictures”), and consequently he arrived at a crossroads — or a period of abjection — in his filmmaking development. Julia Kristeva defines abjection as a crisis that forces the creation of a new language — the zero-point of creativity.

Interestingly enough our general culture, and cinema in particular, seem to have reached the same zero-point that Godard reached 40 years earlier. But whereas Godard came to that point through artistic analysis, our culture has arrived there through hyper-consumption, resulting in a total exhaustion of its lethargic mono-form.

During the conference, Cinema Degree Zero will investigate and debate various possibilities of abject or ‘outsider' cinema(s), and the demands for a new film language. Lee Ellickson's presentations are always illuminating and will take us through a journey of free associations exploring the idea of transformation and re-birth in the cinema of the last century. Also in the daytime program we will have the Otolith Group, who will contest our prejudices of cinema with a synthesis of aesthetics and philosophy.

Miodrag Šuvaković will be speaking about the destruction of cinema in the wild, taboo-breaking work of Dušan Makavejev. Director Makavejev created such politically and sexually transgressive films in the 1960s and 1970s that they shattered the concept of what cinema was in both form and content. This resulted in the banning of his films in many countries throughout the world, and lead to a decade long exile from his home country. In the evening, a special guest speaker is being invited to come and discuss the topic of the death of cinema, and hence its new possibilities for re-birth. Along the way we will also explore the inspiring and rigorous work of Marguerite Duras, Jean Painlevé and Martin Arnold.

Timetable Friday - program 1

13:30-14:30:    
Introduction by Jeffrey Babcock and short film screening of Marguerite Duras' Aurélia Steiner (Melbourne).

14:30-15:30: 
Presentation by the Otolith Group. The symbol of the OTOLITH GROUP is the same as my theme of CINEMA DEGREE ZERO. One of the most important aspects of this theme is the idea of retracing of history to search for models in the past which were neglected and which could be picked up again today and continued. 
The work of Otolith, which is about resurrecting lost films from the past and re-animating them, fits this concept beautifully.

15:30-16:00: 
Screening of short films (a selection of the below):
- Jean Jean Painlevé- L'Hippocampe (1933) 14' + Les amours de la pieuvre (1967) 14'    
- Martin Arnold- Passage à l'Acte (1993) 12 ' +  Pièce Touchée (1989) 16' 

16:00-17:30: 
Lee Ellickson will present his work of film philosophy in action in the presentation- "(The Invariable Return of) Zero, the Counter: An Inventory of Infernal Devices". This will be a free associative discussion of the notion of the cinema as a constitutive site that exists by way of reinvention. 

17:30-18:30: 
Miodrag Šuvaković will speak about the cinema provocateur Dušan Makavejev, entitled "Critical Zero and Wild Death" and we will examine what aspects of this mind-blowing filmmaking can create new possibilities in the cinema today.    

18:30-20:00: 
Film and dinner. Screening of Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis (2006) 94'


20:00-22:00: 
A symposium on "Terminal Cinema". Several special guest speakers have been invited to give presentations of their work upon this subject. The guests will be Zoot Derks (Holland), Sebastian Diaz Morales (Argentina) and Jeanette Groenendaal. 
They will concentrate on the topic of the "death of cinema, and hence its new possibilities for re-birth". We will end the evening with a debate about the end of cinema.

22:00-22:15: 
Screening of Godard's Dans le noir du temps (2002)

This schedule is open to additions and radical changes.

Friday - program 2

The ‘AND’ Place of Action

Recently on a street in Berlin. From my kitchen window I saw a group of people: some of them, wearing a blue jacket and cap, were holding up a banner — the kind of protest banner I have seen in the same street many times before, since I live in a street where the leftist party and labour unions often organize demonstrations. I couldn't read what was written on the banner. It was clearly not hand-made, and again, it reminded me of previous demonstrations I had witnessed. The traffic light turned green, the group crossed the street and it appeared as if they'd move on with their protest. But only now, when the small crowd dispersed in different directions, I realized that the ‘blue' group was part of an advertisement campaign. They had applied the visual instruments of protest; they had used the image of protest as an advertising strategy.

We think we're already participating in a revolution just by watching its images. But that would be too easy. Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and an increasing number of biennales and exhibition spaces demand that something should be exposed: we are living in a time of an excess in exhibiting that is monitored by economics. We need to be clear about the fact that exhibitions of images — in films, shows, newspapers, in the cinema, on the street, on the Internet — turn those images into a manifestation which can be both a trademark and a revolutionary instrument. How can we clearly distinguish what is what in this blurred relation? The posters in the street won't be our means of action. Withdrawing our images from the public sphere won't help us. We need to speak out and to exhibit images. We need to be clear about the conditions in which an image is presented in order to understand that the image does not represent an elsewhere, but that it produces the real at the very moment of its exposure, including us who are watching it. We can learn from the films of Jean-Luc Godard, Anne-Marie Miévielle and Jean-Pierre Gorin that reflection on the means of exposure changes the image from an information carrier to an arena for the production of knowledge. The AND between the manifestation AND the insecurity of an image is our place of action. It reminds us that making images AND watching them is “not a show, but a struggle” (Patricia Lumumba, 1968).

Timetable Friday - program 2

13.30 – 14.00
Introduction Doreen Mende

14.00 – 15.00
Open Film Library Off Screen with Catarina Simão

15.00 – 16.00
Screening for discussion with Filipa César

16.00 – 16.30
BREAK

16.30 – 18.00
Performance lecture by The Otolith Group

18.00 – 20.15
DINNER AND MOVIE: Mortu Nega, (or in English: Those Whom Death Refused) by Flora Gomes (Guinea-Bissau), 1988


20.15 – 22.15
Cinematic Event with Jean-Pierre Gorin

22.30
END OF PROGRAM

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