The cliché has it that in near death experiences we get to see our lives flash past us in a moment. Using the metaphors of water and walking, the films in this programme present different ways of visualizing the stream of thought and the concatenation of images in memory.
This season’s opening session presents a series of films that address the relationship between women and musical composition. These are films with composition models very similar to those of music, scores where the sounds are notated in the form of images that work on their synchrony, where what is seen and what is heard is often materially the same. These kinetic compositions by Eugènia Balcells, Mary Ellen Bute, Lis Rhodes and Blanca Rego serve as a pretext to highlight the presence of female composers in the history of music.
Coinciding with the turn of the century, Jonas Mekas, already in the twilight of his life, undertook an emotional review of his personal world that Xcèntric now recovers on the occasion of the centenary of his birth. From the audiovisual diary in which all his work is set, in As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty the Lithuanian filmmaker captures 30 years of his life in the form of flashes of existence, moments of the beauty of everyday life.
Parallel to their unique cinematographic self-portraits, Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki launched their Série Portraits in the early 1980s, in which they reinvented the art of film portraiture by composing images of women who don't represent any preconceived idea of "femininity" and by engaging in an ethical reflection of woman as subject in a dialogue that tests the boundaries between Self and Other.
In collaboration with Xcèntric, l'Alternativa, Barcelona Independent Film Festival, presents this workshop by Adriana Vila Guevara invites participants to meet a series of nameless ghosts from the past as part of a voyeuristic exorcism that explores the line between preserving the past and creating anew. Found footage is plundered to create an extrasensory conversion of the remnants of other lives, an appropriating ceremony combining contemplation, reinvention and hands-on filmmaking.
Dates:
Saturday, November 20, 2021 (All day) to Sunday, November 21, 2021 (All day)
On November 4, 2001, the first session of Xcèntric took place, a regular program of screenings dedicated to experimental cinema and artists unpublished in the city of Barcelona. Just 20 years later, we celebrate the anniversary of Xcèntric with a set of screenings, performances and talks that make up a tribute to cinema as a collective experience, to the survival of the photochemical film and to the job of the projectionist, in addition to a necessary reflection on the present and the future of cinema in the digital age.
The work of Carles Santos has been chosen to close the film season. This homage includes a poetry reading by Vicenç Altaió, a selection of his films made between 1969 and 1979, many of them rarely screened, a previously unseen piece by the North American filmmaker Joan Logue, two short pieces from the early days of cinema starring the magician Leopoldo Fregoli and a unique concert by the pianist Clara Peya (National Culture Prize 2019), performing a piece composed especially for the occasion in collaboration with the dancer Sílvia Capell.
Decades of scientific exploration have revealed that some regions of the Earth may be similar to the geological environments observed on the surface of Mars. Australia's central desert shares certain unique and singular characteristics with the "red planet": extinct volcanoes, traces of asteroid impact, minerals, arid valleys, sandstone and stony soils the colour of blood caused by the same weathering process.
Through an unusual filmic exploration of the use of framing, lighting, blurring, superimposing and stop motion, the short films in this session try out paths of perceptual experimentation in which specific elements and places - traces of lights, circular or geological shapes - create the more distant cosmic topographies and sinuousness of other planets and unexpected figurations. This programme, with films by Sophie Michael, Manuela de Laborde, Gautam Valluri, Brigid McCaffrey and Jodie Mack, is designed as a parallel activity to the exhibition "Mars.
Dates:
Thursday, March 18, 2021 - 19:00 to Friday, March 19, 2021 - 18:55
With the aim of increasing the visibility of the works contained in the Xcèntric Archive, which until now could only be consulted at the CCCB, we've created a space where experimental films can be viewed online. Once a month and for a limited time, we'll share a film from our catalogue, accompanied by an in-depth presentation given by a specialist. This initiative is carried out in collaboration with the Catalan Association of Film Criticism and Writing (ACCEC).
Dates:
Monday, March 1, 2021 (All day) to Wednesday, March 31, 2021 (All day)
