The second screening in the serie Experimental Ethnography at Cinemateket presents Urban Gardening And Ecology - film screening and Q&A with the filmmakers Elke Marhöfer (Germany/Cuba) and Mikhail Lylov (Russia).

With the artists in person.

Artistic contemporaries and longtime friends, Suzan Pitt and Pat O’Neill have each created large and diverse bodies of work in a wide variety of mediums, though none perhaps more visibly than in film. The Academy is proud to host these two visionary artists in person with a program of their radical and visually stunning short films, newly preserved by the Academy Film Archive.

Albert Alcoz and Blanca Viñas: The invented night

The invented night is the title of a set of recent works where photography and analog cinema maintain a fruitful dialogue revealed through the static and the moving image, figuration and abstraction, forest and city, color and black & white, silence and sound. Films –on super 8 and 16 mm– and photographic slides exchange aesthetic properties and formal parameters in a dialectical proposal. (AA)

Filmmakers Raymonde Carasco (France, 1933-2009), Elke Marhöfer (Cuba/Germany, 1967-), Chick Strand (USA, 1931-2009) and Mark LaPore (USA, 1952-2005) work primarily - from different practices - with ethnographic and anthropological studies, field and archival work. These four programmes with ethnographic films offer a discovery and unveiling of places, people and meetings with social, political and cross-cultural differences in focus.

Camera positioning, image room design, the thermal profile (all of which are produced for and recorded by the camera), things outside the picture, sound, and political and cultural discrepancies are crucial problematics of these filmmakers' positions in the choice of representation. They deal with history and try to release from the binary opposition, I and you and us and them as something alien, an attitude also vital in the production of films.