In the structuralist films in this session, German Werner Nekes and American Paul Sharits each start out from a single resource: panoramic views of the horizon and the double screening of pure colours. This allows them to musically explore the variations of light and colour, expanding the screen and broadening our perception.
We present a sample of the personal cinematographic work of Pierre Clémenti (better known as the actor in Luis Buñuel’s Belle de jour and films by Pasolini, Visconti, Bertolucci and Garrel): diaristic, countercultural, lysergic films.
The protagonists of these dreamy, visionary trance films begin their erotic quests while going through various mental and emotional states. By means of visual symbols or metaphors, elliptical narratives and different editing strategies, Markopoulos addresses the disclosure of sexual identity (Flowers of Asphalt), the rejection of the male heterosexual role (Swain) and unconsummated sexual desire (The Mysteries).
The cliché has it that in near death experiences we get to see our lives flash past us in a moment. Using the metaphors of water and walking, the films in this programme present different ways of visualizing the stream of thought and the concatenation of images in memory.
This season’s opening session presents a series of films that address the relationship between women and musical composition. These are films with composition models very similar to those of music, scores where the sounds are notated in the form of images that work on their synchrony, where what is seen and what is heard is often materially the same. These kinetic compositions by Eugènia Balcells, Mary Ellen Bute, Lis Rhodes and Blanca Rego serve as a pretext to highlight the presence of female composers in the history of music.
Coinciding with the turn of the century, Jonas Mekas, already in the twilight of his life, undertook an emotional review of his personal world that Xcèntric now recovers on the occasion of the centenary of his birth. From the audiovisual diary in which all his work is set, in As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty the Lithuanian filmmaker captures 30 years of his life in the form of flashes of existence, moments of the beauty of everyday life.
Parallel to their unique cinematographic self-portraits, Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki launched their Série Portraits in the early 1980s, in which they reinvented the art of film portraiture by composing images of women who don't represent any preconceived idea of "femininity" and by engaging in an ethical reflection of woman as subject in a dialogue that tests the boundaries between Self and Other.
In collaboration with Xcèntric, l'Alternativa, Barcelona Independent Film Festival, presents this workshop by Adriana Vila Guevara invites participants to meet a series of nameless ghosts from the past as part of a voyeuristic exorcism that explores the line between preserving the past and creating anew. Found footage is plundered to create an extrasensory conversion of the remnants of other lives, an appropriating ceremony combining contemplation, reinvention and hands-on filmmaking.
Dates:
Saturday, November 20, 2021 (All day) to Sunday, November 21, 2021 (All day)
On November 4, 2001, the first session of Xcèntric took place, a regular program of screenings dedicated to experimental cinema and artists unpublished in the city of Barcelona.Just 20 years later, we celebrat
The work of Carles Santos has been chosen to close the film season. This homage includes a poetry reading by Vicenç Altaió, a selection of his films made between 1969 and 1979, many of them rarely screened, a previously unseen piece by the North American filmmaker Joan Logue, two short pieces from the early days of cinema starring the magician Leopoldo Fregoli and a unique concert by the pianist Clara Peya (National Culture Prize 2019), performing a piece composed especially for the occasion in collaboration with the dancer Sílvia Capell.
