Presenting three films of very differing genres and approaches, this programme reflects the fascination people have always felt with the ability of photography to make the invisible visible, even according it supernatural attributes.
Based on an ontology founded on an immutable belief in images and the power of conversing with the invisible, cinema took from spiritualist photography the elements of a formal grammar whose phenomena of on-screen appearance and disappearance are the essential markers of its magical nature.
Belgian experimental film festival L’Âge d’Or comes back next October 3-10 with the second edition of its new run. 2015 celebrates the 50th anniversary of Super 8 and so for its second edition, the Âge d’Or festival has chosen to pay homage to the work of the fiercest advocates of this format, too often denigrated and considered ‘amateur’. A format however that has been, and sometimes still is, the terrain of innovative cinematic experiments, full of the constraints that only it can create.
Dates:
Saturday, October 3, 2015 (All day) to Saturday, October 10, 2015 (All day)
La Vidéoshop is the first and last store in a video rental chain that will never stretch from North America to France. La Vidéoshop will offer videos that you can’t find at a video shop. Avant-garde, anti-commercial, and DIY. La Vidéoshop will be located in a space that we can’t afford (Do you have any idea how much it costs to rent this place?). La Vidéoshop doesn’t sell anything. We don’t charge admission to the nightly screenings. Even the wine is free. Our business model is fatally flawed. La Vidéoshop won’t last. Enquire within for franchising opportunities. One day, there won’t be a Vidéoshop near you.
Dates:
Thursday, June 18, 2015 (All day) to Tuesday, June 30, 2015 (All day)
The ability of photography to make visible the imperceptible has fascinated and nourished a collective unconscious inclined to assign her with a set of supernatural attributes. Taking up the foundations of an ontology based on ageless beliefs to images and their conversation with the invisible powers, cinema has drawn from the register of spirit photography the elements of a formal grammar in which the phenomenon of appearance and disappearance on the screen are the markers of its magical nature. Like Georges Méliès in the role of a photographer making a portrait of a young woman by only using his psychic powers (The Spiritualistic Photographer, 1903), the American artist Rebecca Baron (based in Los Angeles) offers with Détour de Force (2014) an disturbing portrait of Ted Serios, an atypical figure in American popular culture of the 1960s who was able to expose the surfaces of Polaroid film by his thought. If Méliès has exalted through its optical traps the magical aspect of the photographic image, Rebecca Baron explores the mainstream media coverage of Ted Serios and his mental pictures (thoughtography) in which both became the subjects a morbid attraction where the use of imagination is denied. The demystification of photography denounced by Détour de Force seems to find in an industrial film produced by the American Chemical Society his negative reflection.
This series presents films and videos that depict and embody systems of power and ruptures where these systems become visible. The nature of observing and being observed; life within a surveillance state; individual testimony and collective memory; and the role of the artifact as evidence within suppressed histories are ideas and themes that will be explored throughout the six programs.
