Film and Video

In this lecture, theorist and experimental cinema historian P. Adams Sitney (New Haven, Connecticut, 1944) will discuss the nature and history of experimental American film in the second half of the twentieth century.

In Portugal António Reis (1927–1991) is regarded a visionary, a master who had a major influence on the awakening of Portuguese cinema after Salazar’s dictatorship and on a new generation of film-makers in the 1980s and 1990s. Alongside his wife, psychologist Margarida Cordeiro (1939), he directed four films, shot in a new lyrical and hypnotic language. These films are presented in this film series with Manoel de Oliveira’s film Rite of Spring, on which Reis worked as assistant director and which denoted the beginnings of ethnographic and poetic film-making.

In conjunction with the film series The Eye in Matter. Dziga Vertov and Early Soviet Cinema, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía in collaboration with Filmoteca Española, the artist and film-maker Peter Kubelka will conduct a workshop on filmic creation, centred on debate and experimentation. The workshop will see Kubelka present and debate his work with the audience.

Adam Curtis reveals the way power works, its meandering architecture, the ideas that configure it, the agents and institutions involved, the way it is etched into contemporary geopolitics, into us. Power reverberates through one of the most lucid and revealing bodies of work in recent times, part of which is the focus of this film series. The films, remastered in new versions, are complemented with a masterclass, two sessions with carte blanche, ‘blank pages’, and a series of presentations.

Part retrospective and part recontextualization, this series presents a number of Vertov’s feature films and selections from his early chronicles, together with documentaries from the early soviet cinema.

How do the film-makers negotiate the paradoxical side of the painting, between allegory and index? What are the different ‘Guernicas’ that appear in these four essay films?

This series presents the filmic actions, imaginaries and productions of  the Tricontinental, a collaboration between Global South countries during the period of decolonisation and emancipation in the 1960s and 1970s. A cosmopolitan surge of activity interspersed and  circulated hitherto national and fragmentary debates over the so-called Third Cinema and the New European cinemas, constructing an alter-global network involving film-makers such as Glauber Rocha, Ruy Guerra, Leon Hirszman, Humberto Solás, Santiago Álvarez, Ousmane Sembène, Sarah Maldoror and Masao Adachi.

The so-called “refugee crisis” has pervaded Western screens, showing death in the Mediterranean and the exodus through Europe as a major humanitarian catastrophe. This series looks at how artists and film-makers in Europe and the Middle East have reacted to the situation, reflecting on the implications of its visibility and the strategies for responding to what is shown.

Argentinian artist David Lamelas’ incorporation of the notion of duration and real time into different mediums is one of the most profound. This programme brings together the entire Time as Activity film series, in which the artist has recorded different cities at specific times, starting in 1969 and running up to the present day. The series interweaves the phenomenology of art from 1960 with the continuous, global and hyperconnected time of the intangible economy.

This series shows the films of Marcel Broodthaers as a sum of contradictions from which to understand his work as a whole, and develops the reasons for the medium’s privileged place, its investigation and filmic imaginary in contemporary art after 1970.

Within the framework of the programme Intervalos, Museo Reina Sofía screens Political Advertisement IX 1952–2016, an audiovisual project by artists Antoni Muntadas and Marshall Reese, to be shown in the run-up to the U.S. presidential elections.

Museo Reina Sofía presents, in collaboration with Filmoteca Española, a comprehensive retrospective on the film-makers Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. The series, comprising works spanning from 1962 to the present day, reflects one of the most cohesive and relevant film projects in the 20^th century, whereby cinema is both an artistic form and a way of politically bursting forth in the present. Engaging in dialogue with Jean-Marie Straub, the series includes new translations of the vast majority of the films, original format screenings, remastered copies, a significant number of premieres in Spain, and a new publication featuring essays on the film-makers.       

The Intervalos (Intermissions) programme, which shows screenings of recent film work, presents a preview of Andrés Duque’s latest movie, Oleg and Strange Arts. The film moves between biography and performance, bearing witness, through moments in the life of Russian composer Oleg Karavaychuk (1927–2016), to the return of beauty that is at once eccentric, fragile and pathological.

The open-air cinema is closely linked to summer holidays: a space and time where the working class is freed from work obligations and where the chance for enjoyment and leisure presents itself. This series, screened on the outdoor terraces of the Museo, offers a journey through the history of the medium, focusing on its relationship with the conception of holidaying, leisure, travel and tourism, through which a whole range of ideas and questions that surface at this intersection are analysed.

Museo Reina Sofía presents this retrospective film-program dedicated to Cuban documentary movement around the Revolution, an Avant-garde episode in Latin America usually ignored. Together with the impulse to show a new reality and rethink the public function of the image, the documentary in Cuba merges the factual record with the aesthetics of shock and agitation of the montage, producing a unique visual manifesto.

This double performance serves as an introduction to the Hito Steyerl retrospective in the Museo. The studied disappearance of the image in modern surveillance technology is developed in a performance lecture by the artist, followed by an exploration into the new acoustic landscape of war – between military noise and sounds from consumer devices - by Kassem Mosse. Both performances are a posthumous homage to Harun Farocki.

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster employs literature to explore the relationship between fiction and reality, and theatre to juxtapose an imaginary narrative of the present. This Intervalos session sees three of her films screened, including Otello 1887, a cinematic opera filmed in the Palacio de Cristal and co-produced by the Museo.

This film series presents a panoramic view of recent independent film from Latin America, while also introducing a new screening area in the Museo – the transformation of the outdoor terraces into a new open-air cinema. Scene Games offers an interpretation of the latest films from Latin American cinema, barely seen in Europe, where theatricality is the key element in approaching reality.

A debate runs through a whole century of images of bodies in movement: that which refers to the correspondence between these bodies in live performance (on stage, in the gallery or museum) and in film. Through this question, the aim is to elucidate whether the audiovisual record of practices in which the body is at the centre – contemporary dance and artistic performance – “faithfully” reflects its apparent inherent truth.

In collaboration with FILMADRID, a new space devoted to contemporary auteur cinema, the Museo Reina Sofía and Filmoteca Española (the Spanish Film Institute) welcome the retrospective Lav Diaz. The Evolution of a Filipino Film-maker, centred upon a contemporary director whose experiments with duration best represent the popular and tragic history of a community.

Intervalos is a film programme showing contemporary audiovisual works, Museo's own productions and works that, between the performative and the cinematic, show the new directions of the moving image. This new edition of Intervalos presents Letters to Max, the latest film by Eric Baudelaire

This programme of activities, which relates Sahrawi culture to a broader social and cultural framework, aims to become tuiza, a space that reimagines an alternative possible geography, where its centres are not metropolises of financial power, but narrations and accounts of a periphery that lives on in expressions of identity and cultural contamination.

This series explores how the museum has been conceived, represented and questioned in different film poetics. Filming the museum institution entails not only a discussion on how art is exhibited and its mechanism of interpretation, but also how other past times in the present are inserted and reactivated, articulating an amalgamation of transience, inside and outside the present, that is specific to the museum and its narrations.