Programme:

Introductions and Q&A featuring filmmaker Ben Russell in person.

- Let us persevere in what we have resolved before we forget (2013, 20 min., Super-16mm on video)
“We are happy. (Silence.) What do we do now, now that we are happy?” – Samuel Beckett, “Waiting for Godot”
“John Frum prophesied the occurrence of a cataclysm in which Tanna would become flat, the volcanic mountains would fall and fill the river-beds to form fertile plains, and Tanna would be joined to the neighbouring islands of Eromanga and Aneityum to form a new island. Then John Frum would reveal himself, bringing in a reign of bliss, the natives would get back their youth and there would be no sickness; there would be no need to care for gardens, trees or pigs. The Whites would go; John Frum would set up schools to replace mission schools, and would pay chiefs and teachers.” – Peter Worsley, “The Trumpet Shall Sound: a study of cargo cults in Melanesia”

Emblematic film of the modernity in the cinema history, La Jetée (1963) by Chris Marker has influenced the unconscious of a cinephilia by its revolutionary structure borrowed from the photomontage. Created from still images on which the comment of an off-camera narrator adds its own story, the film draws the outline of a utopian space in which the temporalities of photography and narrative are intermingled through the phenomenon of cinema projection. In his search of childhood buried memories, the Brazilian artist Pablo Pijnappel (born in Paris in 1979) revives in his work Fontenay-aux-Roses (2010) the founding principles of an experience based on memory and poetry that was inaugurated by Chris Marker. By borrowing a selection of 80 still images made in Paris by other, Fontenay-aux-Roses deploys the intriguing beauty of a chronicle nourished by the nostalgia of memories and the desire of a fiction without beginning or end. On the projected images that appear successively on the screen by following the predetermined order by the carousel of a slide projector, the voice of a narrator physically present in the movie theater, delivers one after the other the pieces of a puzzle that each viewer is led to reconstruct.

If the end of the 1960s was marked by the American underground, it was also a particularly fecund period in the development of conceptual cinematic proposals made by artists and filmmakers who were sharing a special interest to the consubstantial components of the film. This approach, which some film historians have defined as structuralist, has drawn the outlines of a new ontology of the film based on the rejection of his illusionist nature and motivated by the deconstruction of its own means of production. Paradoxically or not, this reflexive tendency of cinema has made its dependence – firstly historical and technological - to the photography one of the central elements in the affirmation of its autonomy. By appropriating production stills photography, the American artist Morgan Fisher has displaced, in Production Stills (1970), the documentary function of these still pictures by exhibiting them successively in the front of his 16mm camera and making them both object and subject of his film. This principle of succession finds an extension in Gary Beydler’s Pasadena Freeway Stills (1974) in which the Californian artist explores the relationship between stillness and moving pictures through the scrolling phenomenon. If the films of Fisher and Beydler make from the exposure of their production process by using photography one of the theoretical clue of their reading, Wavelength (1967) by the Canadian Michael Snow achieves, through the masterful and minimalist operation of a continuous zoom movement toward a photograph hung on the wall of a studio, a new ontology of the film in which the photography would appear as a simple off-center element.