Back To Landscape
As part of the 1st International Festival Of Short Movies About Painting Arts "Erarta MOTION PICTURES"
Saturday, March 30 2013, 20h
Erarta Museum
Line 29th, 2 Vasilyevsky island, Saint-Petersburg 199106, Russia

Curated by Xavier G.Puerto

After the appearance of Giorgione’s “La Tempesta” in 1506, the importance of landscape grew. It occupied the centre of compositions and became a key topic of consideration for the history of painting in recent centuries, reaching its pinnacle with the German proto-Romantic movement “Sturm und Drang” and the British painters of the 19th Century.

But this huge popularity prompted a use and abuse of the topic, and tastes changed with the arrival of the Novecento (20th.). The new art of the century, cinematography, made its final bet on fiction, setting landscape to a decorative function. When painting, its original and main field of action, underwent the rise of abstraction, it seemed the last nail in the coffin for what was now considered a kitsch topic. While some masters of cinema tried to place landscape at the centre of discussion their championing wasn’t enough for a seventh art which focused its attention on new techniques.

Right at the turn of the second millennium, with a wide development of different techniques and methods in filmmaking, stunning new special effects technologies, and the possibility of creating worlds from nowhere, artists have paradoxically decided to return to an ancient means of expressing themselves - not as the topic of their works in an intellectual manner but in transforming, manipulating, and retouching nature with new tools, taking the landscape as a concept for demonstrating all their capacities, and providing a new interpretation of a historic issue.

Take a seat, a program of more than an hour will bring us in a soft and rough trip. “Back to Landscape”, through different pieces, sees filmmakers employing unusual lenses, coordinated choreographies, barely real environments or new perspectives, considering whether landscape or cityscape a free field for experimentation and a testing place for new techniques and formal innovation.

Oporto apresenta #30: From the Age of Recklessness
Saturday, March 23 2013, 22:30h
Oporto, Salvador Correia de Sá, 42, 2 frente, 1200-399 Lisboa

"From the Age of Recklessness" by Klaus Wyborny
16 mm film transfered to video, color, sound, 70', 1994

Oporto is finally presenting the seventy-minute-long autobiographical film by Klaus Wyborny. In this film the film-maker, a former quantum physicist, talks about memory and traveling along with history and geometry, all seen from his adventurous past relationships. The film is an eternal flow of memories presented alongside a cocktail of extremely dry humor and melancholia. Wyborny approaches film as a scientific experiment in fiction and truth, and his goal is to capture (with a special camera device) the untenable flux of life in order to trigger the untenable flow of memories.

"Instructions on death avoidance and the eternal energy flow" - Alexandre Estrela

Conversations at the Edge: Wavelengths, in the blink of an eye
Thursday, March 21 2013, 18h
Gene Siskel Film Center
164 N. State, Chicago, IL, USA
Curator Andréa Picard in person

Named for but also infinitely inspired by Michael Snow’s 1967 masterpiece, Wavelength, the Toronto International Film Festival’s avant-garde program presents films and videos that defy convention, suggest alternate ways of thinking, and sometimes re-emerge from a distant past in order to comment on the present. Curated by Andréa Picard, who has curated Wavelengths since 2006, this program is a Wavelengths compendium featuring a number of works from the 2012 line-up (including Nathaniel Dorsky’s August and After, Ernie Gehr’s Auto-Collider XV and Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan’s View from the Acropolis which were all cited in the New York Times’ best films of the year wrap-up and screen as Chicago premieres) and highlights from previous editions, including a 35mm restored print from La Cinémathèque française of Henri Storck’s too-rarely seen 1929 Surrealist gem, Pour vos beaux yeux. Blinking is not encouraged!

Light Industry: Two Films by Marjorie Keller
Tuesday, March 19 2013, 19:30h
155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn, New York 11222

Writing in Artforum in 1981, Amy Taubin praised Marjorie Keller as “perhaps the only major filmmaker that the American independent film has produced since the end of the Sixties.” At the time of her sudden death in 1994 at age 43, she would leave behind twenty-seven 8mm and 16mm films; tonight, Light Industry presents two of her most important works, Misconception and Daughters of Chaos. Built from small-gauge diary footage, both films are at once lyrical and anti-romantic, meditations on female experience that render their subjects through radically nonlinear editing and complex experiments in sound-image correspondence. Like Stan Brakhage, one of Keller's great influences, she transforms her subject matter—a birth, a wedding—from the stuff of home movies to an adventure in perception. Yet she forgoes the self-mythologizing of her predecessor, offering a more earthbound, though no less poetic, take on the subjective nature of memory.

Keller also produced a substantial body of writings, including a book on the role of childhood in the work of Brakhage, Jean Cocteau, and Joseph Cornell, as well as notes towards a proposed study of women’s experimental cinema that would have charted a trajectory from pioneers like Germaine Dulac, Maya Deren, and Carolee Schneemann through to a younger generation represented by Peggy Ahwesh, Su Friedrich, and Leslie Thornton, among others. In addition to her achievements as an artist and critic, Keller played a crucial role in the Collective for Living Cinema, serving on its board of directors and editing the Collective’s publications Idiolects and Motion Picture. She engaged in the evolving debates around feminism, film, and the avant-garde that ran from the 70s through the 90s, vigorously defending a tradition of highly personal, formally rigorous work that some had rejected as irredeemably masculinist, while at the same time subjecting that tradition to a nuanced critique through her own scholarship and filmmaking. Though highly skeptical of the ways in which feminist film studies had, ironically, come to ignore some of the considerable accomplishments by women in the American avant-garde, Keller was nevertheless one of the key figures of her era to synthesize theory and practice at the most advanced level.