Les Rencontres Internationales — Mardi 2 décembre — La Gaîté lyrique — Screening — Slash Paris

Past: Tuesday, December 2, 2014 at 2:15 PM

Totalitaire —14h15 — Auditrorium

Ding Shiwei : Goodbye Utopia 

Animation — hdv — noir et blanc — 00:07:31 — Chine — 2014

In memory of ancient humans, God issued commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai and said, “can not kill.” However Nietzsche tells us that God has been dead already. Human beings created God, but also exterminated God. We childbirth themselves, but also slay ourselves.

Hayoun Kwon : Village modèle 

Vidéo — hdv — couleur et n&b — 00:10:00 — Corée du Sud — 2014


(French only) Librement inspirée du village de propagande nord coréen, Kijong-dong, Hayoun Kwon révèle un « lieu-décor » et nous plonge dans la fiction, accomplissant son voyage par procuration. 
Le film témoigne de ce village fantôme dans son véritable état : un mécanisme de fiction. La réalité d’une frontière face à sa mise en scène… Un village inatteignable autrement que par l’imagination.

Micael Espinha : Cinza

Vidéo — hdv — noir et blanc — 00:10:02 — Portugal — 2014

A visual and soundscaped short ambience voyage through an utopian, ghost-like city-state, which works like a small essay on the portuguese dictatorship.

Bettina Nürnberg, Dirk Peuker : Zement 

Documentaire — hdv — Couleur — 00:12:38 — Autriche — 2014

The Nazis set up a concentration camp in Ebensee. Nürnberg and Peuker wonder what conclusions they can draw from the topography about dealing with the past. The takes remain static; a woman’s voice dryly contributing information from off screen is all that clarifies the context within contemporary history. A site that looks like a dirt road turns out to be the “Löwengang (Lion’s Walk),” which the camp’s prisoners were driven down like animals to reach a tunnel that had to be dug. As soon as the film moves to the residential area that was founded on the site of the concentration camp shortly after the end of the war, surprise at the lack of sensitivity in dealing with the past mixes into the off-screen commentary. What Zement aims to get at is the ambiguity of this proximity of commemorative site and settlement.

Zone de Guerre — 15h15 — Auditrorium

Maj Hasager : Two within close range 

Film exp. — super8 — couleur — 00:15:00 — Danemark, Palestine — 2011

Two Within Close Range, 2011 Maj Hasager The project Two within close range is an investigation of urban spaces that remain private or inaccessible despite their public significance. The urban structures and familiar places — a park and a construction site with a disputed past — are used to reflect the socio-political issues in the area outside the walled city of Jerusalem. Instead of remaining invisible and unnoticeable in the everyday environment, aspects of contemporary experience of place are revealed through observations of the usage patterns of the selected sites, the Rockefeller Garden and the Nusseibeh building. In this way, they become the centre of attention. In the work, the two sites are represented through still images, video and 8 mm film corresponding with written narratives weaved together in an attempt to re-write and expand what already exists as the oral history of these places. The written narratives deal with the recent past of the area, as well as historical and political narratives, through a more descriptive and spatial approach. By using official information, personal stories collected from the area and fictional elements, a mix of voices and positions appear in order to reproduce and examine recent, at times unnoticed, history.


Adla Isanovic : Images Within Us 

Vidéo — hdv — couleur — 00:04:19 — Bosnie Herzégovine — 2012 


There is a huge amount of well-known media reports recorded in Sarajevo during the Siege (1992-1996). Media framed those events, streets, places and people into well-known images, common representations of war. Audience around the world was/is able to watch such imagery, over and over again. Adla Isanović erased the whole urban scene and context out of it, leaving only images of people. In that way, she explores how does the audience`s relationship to such imagery of people, whose context is erased-change. After pictures, what remains? What is our relationship with such images, representations, subjectivity, knowledge, with facts, feelings, emotions and experiences?

Boaz Levin, Adam Kaplan : Last Person Shooter 

Vidéo — hdv — couleur — 00:11:55 — France — 2014 


Last Person Shooter examine a range of both human and mechanical modes of vision. By way of a series of historical scenes reconstructed as 3D architectural models, the historical context of machine vision and its underlying concepts are conjured. These models are explored by an invisible protagonist, embodying the familiar, yet antiquated aesthetic of a first-person shooter. The work opens with a reconstruction of the assassination of Ahmed Jabri, a Palestinian militant who was targeted by an Israeli drone in November 2012. The assassination was documented simultaneously both by Palestinian passersby and by the IDF’s drone, creating two parallel, conflicting narratives: these were then uploaded to Youtube and tweeted, in what was in effect a war of images. The video leads into a dreamlike digital desert, evoking the Cuban Missile Crisis and its significance for the development of satellite reconnaissance during the 1960s. The protagonist embodies a birds-eye view, exploring the blind spots and prejudices of such varying perspectives. Finally, the film concludes with a reenactment of a video shot by an American soldier in Afghanistan in a first-person perspective. The footage offers an immersive, bleak representation of 21st century warfare and its mediation.

Nicolas Maigret : War Zone 

Vidéo — hdv — couleur — 00:10:00 — France — 2014

WAR ZONE explore les tensions entre les technologies et leur héritage militaire. La majorité des ruptures technologiques profondes étant issues de la recherche militaire, leur diffusion dans le domaine public n`est-elle pas une propagation des valeurs idéologiques dans lesquelles elles ont été produites? “Il n’est pas superflu de rappeler […] le lien originel entre technologies militaires et technologies du réseau (l’arpanet, ancêtre d’internet, a été développé par la DARPA, l’agence américaine chargée des projets en recherche avancée pour la Défense). […] L’artiste reconstitue en vision subjective trois trajectoires de missiles dans le logiciel Google Earth, à partir des coordonnées réelles. Celle d’un missile V2, développé par les nazis, tiré de la Hollande vers l’Angleterre en 1945 (dont l’impact est encore visible dans les images satellites actuelles), un Scud tiré du Koweït vers l’Arabie Saoudite pendant la guerre du golfe et, enfin, un missile air sol tiré d’Israël vers Gaza en 2014. «C’est grâce à la fusée V2 équipée d’une caméra qu’on a pu voir la première image de la Terre vue de l’espace et l’incurvation de la planète». Le résultat est hypnotique, générant un sentiment mitigé de fascination et d’effroi. En train de chevaucher notre missile à la manière d’un Docteur Folamour, on observe pensif l’évolution de ces instruments de mort, de la précision médiocre des V2 aux frappes chirurgicales d’Israël, la nation qui compte le plus grand nombre de start-up, notamment dans la cyberdéfense, et où l’armée est le principal creuset de l’innovation.” Marie Lechner

Point de retour — 16h15 — Auditrorium

Miguel Rato : Meeting Point 

Documentaire exp. — hdv — couleur — 00:10:04 — Portugal — 2014 


The imagined city as a simulation takes over the real one. Desire and reality meet creating a new space with its own rules. Ever sprawling suburban areas, anonymous landscapes generated by computers, places with no memory, landmarks, residential projects. Staged scenery for action to take place. Mostly filmed in London, Meeting Point is a study of urban space and of its representations, the virtuality of contemporary public space and landscape.

Rob Todd : LoveSong 

Film exp. — 16mm — couleur et n&b — 00:06:00 — USA — 2014

Threads, strings, love`s touch attuned, rising like the dawn in song.

A lyrical filmmaker as well as a sound and visual artist, Robert Todd continually produces short works that resist categorization. His visually stunning body of work, which comes from a deeply personal place, takes a variety of poetic approaches to looking at the personal, political, and social ways in which we choose to live. His large body of short-to-medium format films have been exhibited internationally at a wide variety of venues and festivals. He teaches film production at Emerson College.


Soufiane Adel : Go Forth 

Documentaire exp. — hdv — couleur — 1:02:00 — France — 2014

(French only) À travers le portrait d’une femme de 79 ans, Taklit Adel, ma grand-mère, née en Algérie et vivant en France depuis 60 ans, se noue à la fois le fil de la petite et de la grande Histoire et l’exploration de la banlieue et de son ensemble. Une histoire personnelle prise dans l’histoire collective.

Hyperculture — 18h15 — Auditrorium

Art Collective Neozoon : MY BBY 8L3W 

Vidéo — hdv — couleur — 00:03:03 — Allemagne — 2014

MY BBY 8L3W Synopsis The thirty track installation MY BBY 8L3W is a video collage about women who present their pets on the internet. The women simultaneously speak the same lines about their love for the animals


Jonathan Monaghan : Mothership 

Animation — hdv — couleur — 00:14:42 — USA — 2013 


Salvador Dali meets science fiction in a fantastical vision from an alternate reality. Cows, superheros, video games, luxury hotels, and operating rooms seamlessly meld in a surreal exploration of value and power in the digital era. Trapped in an endless loop of seductive but ultimately vacuous simulation where meanings don’t quite materialize.

Ryan Trecartin : Comma Boat 

Vidéo — hdv — couleur — 00:33:02 — USA — 2013

Avant-Poste — 19h15 — Auditrorium


Hans Op De Beeck : Before the rain(a village) 

Documentaire exp. — hdv — Couleur — 00:12:00 — Belgique, inde — 2013 


Before the Rain (A Village) shows us the daily events in this South Indian region, which combines a mineral, eroded landscape with rice fields, sheep herds and the impressive ruins of the Vijayanagara dynasty (1336-1565). During the rain season the artist stayed in the remote South Indian village, where humans and animals live together in small huts and sheds. He filmed only just before the onset of a new shower of rain—a time when the light becomes very diffuse and the sky becomes strangely, vaguely white. Oddly enough, as a result the Indian village bathes in a typically subdued, Western European light that is very unusual in the south of India. The film is constructed as a series of silent tableaux vivants that are filmed with a static, frontal camera on a tripod. Op de Beeck quite deliberately sought the small, everyday things we share beyond cultural borders, and consciously stayed away from the spectacular and that which is explicitly related to religion, mysticism or “being different”. Thus with this film he tried to create a sort of imaginary, universal village that speaks about how time silently passes in a small community, while avoiding the “exoticizing” glance of the idealizing idyll. The work invites a silent, sensory perception and reflection.


Eléonore De Montesquiou : Horses People Time 

Vidéo — hdv — noir et blanc — 00:16:46 — France — 2014 


Horses, people, time original title: кони, люди, время a film by Eléonore de Montesquiou with Olga Tüvi and Eduard Habik 17 minutes 
2012
 b&w
 language: Russian with English subtitles «The seagulls are waking up, can you hear them? It’s really hard to believe that these are now two different cities with a border.» told Olga to Eduard on the roof of a collective housing building where she works as a lift supervisor. A white night in this border town between Estonia and Russia, Olga and Eduard are tired, they are waiting for the sun to rise. „Horse, people and time“, Eduard refers to Lermontov’s poem „Borodino“ and indeed at this time in this peculiar place, almost non existing, philosphy, politics, all possible topics are grasped and dealt with.


Nick Jordan, Jacob Cartwright : Headlands Lookout.

Documentaire exp. — hdv — couleur — 00:23:54 — United Kingdom — 2014 


Headlands Lookout is an experimental documentary by collaborative artists Jacob Cartwright and Nick Jordan, centred a dramatic stretch of Pacific coastline at the entrance to San Francisco Bay. The film traverses the area’s cultural and natural landscape, presenting a ‘wild’ environment mediated by human activity. From fog-shrouded hills to singular details of place, Headlands Lookout presents literal and figurative echoes of the area`s history, as both a former military base and the home to the avant-garde artists, writers and activists of the post-war ‘San Francisco Renaissance’. Locations range from the functional architecture of concrete gun emplacements and Cold War missile sites to the dense woodland valley where nature is slowly reclaiming the derelict buildings of Druid Heights, a 1960s counterculture community, and home to abandoned, circular library of Zen philosopher Alan Watts. The film`s soundtrack features archive recordings of Alan Watts, and his ideas on ecology and society, alongside poetry by former Druid Heights residents Gary Snyder and Elsa Gidlow, and Bay Area poet Michael McClure. Headlands Lookout is punctuated throughout by contemporary call records to the Marin County Sheriff, offering glimpses of individual, human-scale dramas, set against a backdrop of ever-present nature and delineated landscapes.


Felice D’Agostino, Arturo Lavorato : In attesa dell’avvento 

Documentaire exp. — hdv — couleur et n&b — 00:22:20 — Italie — 2011

1861 — 1971 — 2011. Dates, but also firm props of the official rhetoric that formulates and reformulates the interpretation of actual history. 1861’s celebrations of Italian Unification see us now in this tough 2011, disclosing a strong emphasis that clashes against the unresolved Italian past. Playing with the banality of historical dates, the film wedges a third date Reggio Calabria’s 1971 revolt. Unsettling shadows coming back to disturb the order with which politicians wish to govern the present crisis.

De Passage —21h00 — Auditrorium

Daniel Nicolae Djamo : Pasari

Vidéo — hdv — couleur — 00:07:32 — Roumanie — 2014 


The work is based on fragments from interviews taken from Romanian immigrants living in Paris in 2011, 2013 and 2014. Shot in Nogent sur Vernisson. Loiret, on December 28th, 2013. 2013 had a warm autumn and an even warmer winter debut. I think that this is one of the reasons why the birds that live along the Loire chose to rest longer. Some rested even until late December. I filmed this material when they started preparing to fly away. ”Birds” presents 7 minutes of French sunset, on continuous shooting, with the migratory birds preparing to leave. It presents the sunset of the West, with governments taking measures belonging to the right. I chose to draw a paralel between this story and statements that I had previously recorded in Paris, belonging to Romanian immigrants.

Laurence Bonvin : Sounds of Blikkiesdorp

Documentaire exp. — hdv — couleur — 00:25:00 — Suisse, Afrique du Sud — 2014 


(French only) “Sounds of Blikkiesdorp” décrit par touches impressionnistes la vie quotidienne dans un “camp de relogement temporaire” de la grande banlieue du Cap. Construit par la municipalité, il a notamment été utilisé pour y loger les residents du camp informel de Symphony Way ou les sans-abris pendant la dernière Coupe du Monde de football ou encore y déplacer de force des locataires du quartier de Woodstock. Dans ce lieu hostile et isolé, malgré les conditions de vie très dures et l`incertitude de leur devenir, les gens que nous rencontrons font tout pour améliorer leur quotidien. Le strict plan quadrillé, l’alignement stérile des cabanes en aluminium est lentement subverti par l’improvisation et l`informalité. Et la musique, omniprésente, traverse les murs et les allées pour créer la bande-son de Blikkiesdorp.

Michael Poetschko : Zona (Fragment I und II)

Fiction exp. — hdv — couleur — 00:51:16 — Autriche — 2012

ZONA (2012) A new urban fabric / Precarious subjects / Points of passage / Between light and language / An errant cartography / A voice yet inaudible in the air The topological narrative follows the routes of an itinerant photographer and a young philosophy student, their searching movements in-between the fractures and folds of the spatio-temporal fabric of the contemporary city. These fragments started with a rereading of Andrei Tarkovsky and the brothers Strugacky’s concept of the zone, as depicted in their late 1970s science fiction script Сталкер (Stalker). We suggest that the zone — a structure outside and closed off in Сталкер — has now entered the very heart of the urban fabric. We aim to explore the precarity, porosity and violence of this biopolitical space-time, as an immanent part of the city, our bodies and desires. The narrative presents itself as an open structure, in which staged miniatures, image and sound collages, dialogue, and different searching movements meet each other; open, rampant, unresolved and contradictory — oscillating constantly between poetic meditation and discourse, diversion and gravity, quotation and philosophical speculation.