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.

Following the tradition of photographers such as James Agee, Rudolph Burckhardt or Peter Hutton, who have extended their practices to filmmaking, American artist Robert Fenz (b. 1969) documents the reality and the complexity of a globalized world by emphasizing a cinematic experience profoundly anchored to the present and marked by a constant experimentation of documentary film in its political and poetic aspects. In association with the new edition of the festival Cinéma du Réel (from March 19th till 29th), the Centre Pompidou has invited Robert Fenz to introduce a selection of his recent filmic works and to discuss his relationship with Robert Gardner (1925-2014) to whom Fenz pays a moving tribute in Correspondence (2011), a film made on the shooting locations of some major filmic achievements by the famous anthropologist and filmmaker.

Born in Sweden, Gunvor Nelson (1931-) began her artistic career as a filmmaker in the mid-60s in San Francisco (USA). Major figure of the American West coast experimental film community, she has created an extraordinary filmic oeuvre, in which we can admire both the strangeness of her characters (Fog Pumas, 1967) and the poetic nature of her imaginary worlds (My Name is Oona, 1969) and the strength of her feminist commitments (Schmeerguntz, 1966). Since the 90s, Gunvor Nelson has lived and worked in Sweden where she continues through films, videos, paintings or installations, her exploration of the Swedish landscape and identity (Light Years, 1987).

Screening introduced by Julie Savelli (from Paul Valery University - Montpellier III)

Legendary figure of the underground community in New York, Barbara Rubin (1945-1980), hired by Jonas Mekas at the Film-makers’ Coop in New York, has frequented many major artists including Robert Frank, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Smith or Andy Warhol. According Jonas Mekas' testimony, Barbara Rubin has been "the glue between the different factions of artists", introducing, for exemple, the Velvet Underground to Andy Warhol. In 1963, she directed Christmas on Earth – her only film, screened on two superposed screens - a transgressif film inspired by the poem "A Season in Hell" written by Arthur Rimbaud in 1873. In combining through an orgiastic ritual, the self-destructive passions of the young filmmaker - 17 year old at this time - and the aspirations of emancipation from her time, Christmas on Earth became quickly a totemic artwork of the underground scene. 

The screening will be introduced by Philippe-Alain Michaud (Film curator at Centre Pompidou)