Experimental Filmclub: Self-portraits
Sunday 28th June / The Odessa Club / Dublin / 5pm / Doors: 7 euro (5 euro concession)
Experimental cinema is known for its rigorous investigation of the properties and possibilities of the film medium. But, given the intimate and homemade nature of most experimental filmmaking practices, it can also facilitate a rigorous investigation of the properties and possiblities of oneself. While none of the films in this programme are “self-portraits” in any conventional sense, all employ their authors’ own bodies as visual subjects, and explore human experiences of love, grief and loneliness that are extremely personal to their creators. This rootedness in personal experience can make them, in a way, more accessible than more purely formal experimental works. But it also presents a danger: that we will view these works primarily in terms of their autobiographical import rather than their powers as an aesthetic experience.
In seeking to address this, the films in this programme have been selected to cover a range of distinct formal approaches to self-reflection through cinema. Each offers a reinterpretation and expansion of what “portraying oneself” through cinema might be and might lead to. If the resonance and power of these films is strengthened by the impression of unflinching honesty and self-revelation that they share, it is ultimately the different ways in which they are stylistically organised that ensures their impact—rather than the (in some cases, quite ambiguous and tenuous) relation of the films to the specific facts of their authors’ lives.