Les Rencontres Internationales — Vendredi 5 décembre — La Gaîté lyrique — Screening — Slash Paris

Past: Friday, December 5, 2014 at 2:15 PM

Fin de récits — 14h15 — Auditorium

Manuel Billi : Battre, enlever

Vidéo — hdv — couleur — 00:11:00 — Italie — 2014 


(French only) « Maintenant, je suis partout » « Maintenant, je te suis partout ». Des paupières qui s’ouvrent et se ferment en battant le rythme d’une rencontre amoureuse. Des captations de téléphone portable qui enlèvent au réel le sentiment du vécu. “Battre, enlever” est un compte-rendu vraisemblable de faits qui n’ont pas eu lieu ou qui ont eu lieu autrement, le récit d’un amour qui bride et élève à la fois.

Fatima Bianchi : Tyndall

Fiction documentaire — hdv — couleur — 00:29:27 — Italie — 2014 


A lighthouse on the mountains over Brunate, a beam of light incessantly rotating in the dark, shedding light over something which has remained in the shadows. It illuminates one house. The house contains members of one family, portrayed in they daily life. The story revolves around a specific moment in time, when Francesco, the eldest son, spends one year in jail. Around that time each one of the relatives exchanges letters with him. The Tyndall effect is a phenomenon of diffusion of light due to the presence of some particles in the air. It manifests itself, for example, when the car lights are turned on in a foggy day. The same effect is visible from the tower of the lighthouse looking towards the home of the Bianchi’s family.

Thomas Taube : Dark Matters

Fiction exp. — hdv — couleur — 00:20:02 — Allemagne — 2014 


The Film is based on interviews with questions considering the night, which were held with night watchmen in Tokio, Moscow, Kabul, Tirana, Yaoundè, St. Louis, Monterey and Teheran. Actor Lars Rudolph plays a character who is trapped or saved in a zone were the relation between inner and outer space is uncertain.

Francis Naranjo : En Pais Lejano: Utopos

Vidéo — hdv — couleur — 00:04:50 — Espagne — 2013

This is an experimental video work based on the premise of the introductory text: In a very far land, there exist some mythological creatures called SHICHAS. They combine the different gender alternatives and have the quality to absorb all negative energies keeping them inside. The whole piece has been built using a technique that links photograms together. It starts with a white screen where a set of black rectangles progressively spread on the surface of the image. Then, this image merges with another where some characters appear, who have their eyes covered with rectangles which hide their identities. This image represents the main hall of a geriatric, where we can see many residents whose memories are now defeated by their absence of identity. The work ends with a review of moments represented by souvenirs and the twist of those creatures that absorb the negative energy and stand for the globality, now sick and amnesic. The soundtrack is made with the sounds of corporal fluids.


Eli Cortiñas Hidalgo : Quella che cammina

Vidéo — hdv — couleur et n&b — 00:09:30 — Espagne — 2014

`The One Who Walks` (`Quella Che Cammina`) is a central female character in Carlo Lizzanis contribution to the neorealist anthology film “L`amore in città” of 1953. Eli Cortiñas` unconventional filmic composition used this figure of an aging, impoverished prostitute as a nucleus an associative montage of self-filmed material, found footage and fragile sculptural constructions circle around to question her own role as a self-responsible individual, as a working class child, as a woman, as a daughter, as an artist.

Hors lieu— 16h00 — Auditorium


h5. Kay Walkowiak : Minimal Vandalism

Vidéo — hdv — Couleur — 00:03:49 — Autriche — 2013 


Touching art objects in an exhibition space is usually not allowed. Not so in Kay Walkowiak´s Minimal Vandalism, where this prohibition is practically stomped on. The setting, the Generali Foundation in Vienna is the epitome of a modernist exhibition building, which—as neutral White Cube-like shell—is meant to intervene as little as possible in the act of viewing art.. Well, other than the tube-like enfilade with the massive concrete wall running down the middle along which a parcours of minimalist sculptures is set up in Minimal Vandalism. And it truly is a parcours, as after a brief exposition, in which the jerky camera movements already lead us to suspect that something’s up, an entirely unexpected performance unfolds. In one of the few calm takes, a surveillance camera soon becomes visible and the show begins: a skateboarder (Kilian Martin) coming from the depths of the room makes his approach on three boards piled on top of one another, to subject the sculptures to a test of endurance, or skill. The “performer” relentlessly includes the objects in his acrobatics, regardless of the fact that they are art, gliding up onto them, sliding across their surfaces, and daringly jumping over them.

Aglaia Konrad : Das Haus

Film exp. — 16mm — couleur — 00:21:40 — Autriche — 2014 


Das Haus deepens the exploration of sculptural architecture that Aglaia Konrad conducted with the series of 16mm films Concrete and Samples. Shot in a house designed by architect Juliaan Lampens in Sint-Martens-Latem (Belgium), the film resumes the artist’s interest on the possibilities of the cinematic medium to generate –rather than capture — an architectural experience. An experience which, in this film, surpasses the visual to mobilize bodily perception and even desire. Konrad’s editing carefully measures the doses of perceptual information it provides to our orientation drive in a process that departs from an initial willingness to orient oneself towards the pleasure of surrendering to disorientation and fragmentation. A disorientation that could be called “perverse” in the sense that Freud bestowed to the word –perverse pleasures are those which linger in the detour; in the resistance to result in a productive goal– insofar as the film replaces the production of a representation of space in favour of perceptive defamiliarization and tactile pleasure. Architecture and film are constantly looking at each other in a piece in which “angle”, “transition”, “cut”, “sequence”, “frame”, " joint", " fold " and “rhythm” are notions that are spread from one discipline to the other as if the camera and editing would be reading the space as a composition score. There are two architectural comparisons that are often applied to filmmaking: the idea of cinema as a “window” and as “mirror". Das Haus, entangles and complicates those comparisons by treating windows as interfaces that blur the inside and outside and whose transparency acquires materiality, and by using mirrors as devices that disrupt form pushing it to a state of potentiality. In Das Haus the screen is no longer a window but rather a skin: for it is a body interface, a tactile surface and a membrane that is neither safe nor transparent because it reveals its inner cinematic compositional strategies.

Robbrecht Desmet : Am Egelsberg

Film exp. — 16mm — couleur et n&b — 00:26:00 — Belgique — 2014

Am Egelsberg is shot in Krefeld, a town in the Ruhr area in Germany. In the rolling landscape around this former industrial city, Robbrecht & Daem architects realized a striking pavilion, a temporary objet d’architecture based on a design for a golf course clubhouse by Mies van der Rohe, dating from 1930, which was never built. The film plays with the idea that the model leads the gaze towards the landscape but by doing so actually looks back at itself. The huge frames, windows without glass, ‘pull’ the landscape ‘inside’. But our gaze is also thrown back ‘inside’, via the textures and drawings in the wooden plates. These plates remind one of the original marble stone plates that Mies had in mind. The walls become screens as ‘masks’, as André Bazin wrote, ‘whose function is no less to hide reality than it is to reveal it’. The spaces in the film, through the device of the model, become extensions of cinematic space, (far) beyond the boundaries of the image. The 360° degree panorama that is at the heart of the film, showing the landscape without the model, unites ‘before’ and ‘after’ in the present. This film tries to be an imaginative, geo-temporal map of the intimate relationship between cinema and architecture.


Jamie Buckley : Dorf

Vidéo — hdv — couleur — 00:05:26 — Irlande — 2014 


DORF is the second film in a continuing series that concentrates on the grounds of the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. It is informed by a practice that is rooted in contemporary visual art but which draws on documentary filmmaking strategies. The film points to the site a few months after the events of ’72. This was the transitional “ghost town” that existed before the more permanent residents moved in. The site is also shown at an unspecified but possibly contemporary time, when it is a place seemingly full of life. The film clips act as spacial and temporal coordinates that are assembled as a sequence of ordered pairs. Themes that interest me are evident, such as migration, residential space, and the absence of spectacle. A narrative is not explicitly dictated, instead it is allowed to be unpacked by the viewer. The persistence of material objects is brought into question.

Dan Mihaltianu : In the Skin of a Stray Dog

Film exp. — super8 — couleur — 00:05:19 — Roumanie — 2014

In the Skin of a Stray Dog Of dogs and men, black and white film material shot between 1992-1994 and edited twenty years later, depicting the decay of the urban environment after the collapse of Communism in Bucharest and the alternative living in Berlin after the fall of the Wall.


Juliane Henrich : Schleifen

Vidéo — hdv — couleur — 00:05:50 — Allemagne — 2014

A detailed study of the architecture in a small German village slowly reveals an uncanny sense of displacement, erasure and doubling. New houses line freshly paved streets that all have the suffix `-neu` at the end. This journey ends on the outskirts of the village, opening onto the pit mine that will displace the old village.


Arash Nassiri : Tehran-Geles

Fiction exp. — hdv — couleur — 00:18:10 — France — 2014

Tehran-geles nous projette dans un paysage fantastique, dans laquelle les néons grésillants de la capitale iranienne s’incrustent de façon anarchique sur les vues aériennes des quartiers de Los-Angeles. En écho aux écritures publicitaires, les voix enregistrées depuis Skype témoignent du passé de Téhéran. La production de Tehran-geles a elle même produit des ‘migrations’ audio-visuelles : les séquences aériennes tournés à Los Angeles et téléchargés par internet, les enseignes lumineuses filmés à Téhéran avant d’être transportées par avion vers la France dans un disque-dur. Les témoignages d’immigrés ont quand à eux été enregistrés par skype au rythme des décallages horaires.

Cinéma Self — 18h00 — Auditorium

Salla Tykkä : Giant

Documentaire exp. — hdv — couleur — 00:12:47 — Finlande — 2014

Giant features leading junior team gymnasts of Romania. The film is shot in two boarding schools for artistic gymnastics in Onesti and Deva. A soundtrack of interviews with the gymnasts accompanies images of them training and of empty gymnasiums. Archive film footage starting from 1970s and clips from a feature fiction film shot in the same locations reveal not only a continuity in picturing this sport, but also the structures of recording it.


Thom Andersen : The Tony Longo Trilogy

Vidéo — hdv — couleur — 00:14:01 — USA — 2014

“While remastering Los Angles Plays Itself, I re-edited a number of clips, including The Takeover (Troy Cook, 1995), a grungy, sordid straight-to-video film remarkable only because executive producer Michael Woods and star David Amos had in 1990 planned and carried out the murder of Horace McKenna, Woods`s partner in the operation of a chain of strip clubs around Los Angeles—a crime echoed in the movie. After repeated viewings, I noticed a miniature tragedy (or black comedy) spread out over the first sixty minutes. Its protagonist is Waldo the bouncer, the victim of ruses and sucker punches, whose multiple failures lead him to one final heroic attempt to make amends. This is his story.”— Thom Andersen


Aleesa Cohene : That’s Why We End

Vidéo — hdv — couleur — 00:18:00 — Canada — 2013

That’s Why We End depicts a dialogue in three parts between a therapist figure and a client. While the character of the therapist appears on screen, Cohene again invites the viewer to assume the position of the client by providing us only with his voice. In this work, the composite of the therapist is assembled almost entirely from films referenced in Gilles Deleuze’s classic texts Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, whereas the client’s narrative is built from recordings of associative exercises the artist undertook with theorist and artist Eric Cazdyn.

Bold and Beautifull — 19h00 — Auditorium


Michael Robinson : The Dark, Krystle

Fiction exp. — dv — couleur — 00:09:34 — USA — 2013 


The cabin is on fire! Krystle can`t stop crying, Alexis won`t stop drinking, and the fabric of existence hangs in the balance, again and again and again. — MR “The Dark, Krystle brilliantly re-purposes the artificiality of stock gesture, allowing viewers to see its hollowness and to feel it recharging with new emotional power. Equal parts archival fashion show and feminist morality play, Robinson’s montage rekindles the unfinished business of identity, consumption, and excess in 1980s pop culture.” — Carrie Secrist Gallery, Chicago


Neil Beloufa : Tonight and the People

Fiction exp. — hdv — couleur — 1:21:00 — France, USA — 2013

(French only) Dans un Hollywood imaginaire des cow-boys, des membres d’un gang, des militants, des hippies et des adolescentes rebelles élaborent un conte philosophique qui recycle les stéréotypes les plus forts de notre époque. Dans ce monde où documentaire et Science Fiction s’entrechoquent, lutte des classes et invasion extra-terrestre cohabitent.

Ming of Harlem — 21h00 — Auditorium

En présence du réalisateur et de Jean-Luc Nancy.

Phillip Warnell : Ming of Harlem: Twenty One Storeys in the Air

Documentaire — super 16mm — couleur — 1:10:00 — Royaume-Uni, USA, Belgique — 2014

Ming of Harlem: Twenty One Storeys in the Air is an only-in-New-York account of Ming, Al, and Antoine Yates, who cohabited in a high-rise social housing apartment at Drew-Hamilton complex in Harlem for several years until 2003, when news of their dwelling caused a public outcry and collective outpouring of disbelief. On the discovery that Ming was a 500-pound pound Tiger and Al a seven-foot alligator, their story took on an astonishing dimension. The film frames Yates’s recollections with a poetic study of Ming and Al, the predators’ presence combined with a text by philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, reimagining the circumstances of the wild inside, animal names, strange territories, and human-animal relations.