Film and Video

The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía is organising a film series especially for children that offers an assortment of animation, fiction and documentary films from the international scene created just for them. The aim is to introduce children to audiovisual languages that differ from what they are used to seeing on television and in commercial films. The works in the programme, including films like La tête dans les étoiles (Sylvain Vincendeau, 2005), Punam (Lucian Muntean, 2005) and The Bread and Alley (Abbas Kiarostami, 1970), tell fictional stories using different artistic resources and rhythms, taking on topics like the ecology and social harmony and showing little ones how children live in other parts of the world.

Film or cinematic essays - not to be confused with art-house cinema - is the film correlative to the long tradition of the literary essay. These films do not offer a dramatic narrative (like fictional films) or a representation of the historical world (like documentaries), but are a reflection on the medium. This programme constitutes the first presentation in Spain (and one of the first in Europe) of one of the least codified practices in the contemporary audiovisual field. The films selected make it possible to characterise the film essay and observe its evolution over the last decade by comparing works by filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard (Paris, 1930), the artist who has done the most to popularise this form, and Mariano Llinás (Buenos Aires, 1975); personal documentary makers like Ross McElwee (North Carolina, 1947) and Albertina Carri (Buenos Aires, 1973); avant-garde filmmakers such as Barbara Hammer (Hollywood, 1939) and Angela Melitopoulos (Munich, 1961); and video artists like Shelly Silver (New York, 1957), Sean Snyder (Virginia Beach, 1972) and Deborah Stratman (Washington, D.C., 1967).

No Coverage (the title alludes to the proliferation of Arab television channels over the last few decades and how they have chosen to ignore the production of independent video, thus leaving it literally with no coverage) brings together independent experimental videos and documentaries by artists in order to shake up, discredit and reconstruct the limits of experimental video and documentaries in the Middle East. Comprised of videos that include autobiographical stories, testimonial interviews, archive footage and socio-political topics, the goal of the programme is to put Middle East independent video practices into context and explore the characteristics of their evolution. Although it is difficult to precisely define what constitutes ‘independent video’ and ‘experimental documentary’ in the region, the programme shows clearly that both encompass a broad spectrum of aesthetic perspectives and forms.

Surveillant Architectures is a platform from which to view and critique watchfulness in everyday life. It sprang from the idea of creating a new language and protocols to bring to light the theoretical, social, individual and political implications of surveillance, security and terror management issues today.

At the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Irit Batsry (Ramat Gan, 1957)

Since the night that Betty Boop was locked inside a museum (Betty Boop’s Museum, 1932) and the skeletons came to life and began to dance more violently than their old bones could have imagined - causing night watchman Ben Stiller to dream about them 74 years later (Night at the Museum, 2006), museums have been subject to numerous attempts to reactivate them and involve them in temporary media like film and video. When a video enters a museum - as an exhibition piece or the implement of some spy - the eternity of the space tends to give way to the fast cuts, fugues in real time and alternative chronologies found in audiovisual works, whether they are a product of Hollywood or come from the art world.

Klimt (2006) looks at the life and work of the Viennese painter and his relationship with women, his rejection of the artistic and moral conventions of the era and the ideals that guided his life. “The film is not a linear biography of Gustav Klimt’s life and times,” according to Raoul Ruiz (Puerto Montt, 1941- Paris, 2011). “It is a fantasy or better a phantasmagoria. Just like one of his paintings, where the material or imaginary figures mix and rotate around a central fulcrum: the painter Klimt. I wanted to outline the unique stylistic features of Klimt’s art, the prevailance of beauty, the excess of colour, the distorted spaces and the complex parts to catch life and clarify one of the richest, most conflicting and mysterious times of modern history.”

During the 1970s, artists rebelled against painting and the prevailing formalism, embracing aspects like the theatrical dimension of artworks and the relationship between the public and the object: installations instead of paintings, sites instead of sculptures, performance pieces instead of images. Paradoxically, while reducing painting to its formal specificity ended up eradicating it, the application of the same principles to film endowed it with truly revolutionary potential. In their search for the characteristics intrinsic to the medium, artists like Malcolm Le Grice (Plymouth, 1940) rid themselves of the narrative and causality of traditional film to investigate the specific possibilities of the moving image.

Continuous Movement highlights the importance of experimental cinema in the development of film as an independent art form and the evolution of film aesthetics and language, despite the marginal place that this type of film has historically filled with respect to the commercial structures of the audiovisual market. However, experimental film and, later, video have found their place among the visual arts where they share numerous links to the artistic uses of the audiovisual field, particularly with video installation and performance art.

Marine Hugonnier (Paris, 1969), a video artist whose work explores the relationship between landscape and history, presents The Three Continents, a film trilogy comprised of Ariana (2001), The Last Tour (2004) and Travelling Amazonia (2005). In these films, geography acts as a starting point to look at topics like colonialism, utopia and globalisation.

The reception given Samuel Beckett’s (Dublin, 1906 - Paris, 1989) work in Spain was characterised by the commonplace concepts of ‘existentialist literature’ and ‘theatre of the absurd’. This reductionist approach not only anchored Beckett to a very specific historical and aesthetic paradigm, but also marginalised other dimensions of his work to the point of making them almost disappear. This series highlights the link (which seemed improbable, since it does not fit any stereotype) between Beckett and film and television, affirming this facet of his work on the centenary of his birth.

The film Muxima (2005) arose from the love affair that the artist Alfredo Jaar (Santiago de Chile, 1956) has with contemporary African music. For 20 years, Jaar has been collecting this type of music, especially works produced in former Portuguese colonies such as Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. The origins of Muxima (a word that means heart in the Kimbundu language) date back to a day when, trying to organise his extensive collection of Angolan recordings, Jaar discovered that he had six different versions of a song called Muxima.

Contemporary Madness was designed to clear up the hazy boundary separating the reality of perception from the rules of exception, featuring audiovisual creations that present the darker areas of the social order and the human mind using non-fiction and documentary work done in Spain. The works show the invisibility of the limits established by the discourses sanctioned by civil ordinances and medical and political convention.

The love that Susan Sontag (New York, 1933-2004) felt for the cinema (and showed with her participation on selection committees for festivals and programmes for film series around the world, as well as the creation of her own films) is especially manifest in her untiring defence of filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard (Paris, 1930), Chris Marker, Ingmar Bergman and Jack Smith, to name just a few, when their work needed to reach a broader, more appreciative audience (and in the case of Smith, be given legal protection). This series pays tribute to Sontag’s legacy to film culture, establishing a dialogue between films and documentaries by and about Susan Sontag with the works of some of these filmmakers.

Finland is experiencing an exceptional moment with respect to audiovisual production, both in quality, diversity and distribution. Specific political decisions, school curricula and distribution platforms have specifically contributed to this situation. Video Creation from Finland brings together a set of varied and different approaches to the medium which at the same time share a special relationship with their environment, a fragmented narrative and even a similar approach to images and shots that is disconnected from video tradition and much more akin to film.

The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía is dedicating a retrospective to the work of Peggy Ahwesh (Pittsburgh, 1954), one of the most groundbreaking and irreverent filmmakers of the American underground. Ahwesh began to make films in the early 1980s, projecting all of the effervescence of punk into her work. According to Eileen Myles, the Kodak Company would return each roll of developed film to her with a patient explanation that that they “had done it wrong”. Like Andy Warhol, Ahwesh gave her actors complete freedom in the field, but did impose some cut-off limits never imagined by the creator of Sleep (1963), to whom Ahwesh paid tribute with The Fragments Project (1985-1995).

Vasco Araújo (Lisbon, 1975), an artist who uses installation, video and photography to reflect on sexual identity, strategies of representation and reality, is presenting the films Recital (2002), Hipólito (2003), The Girl of the Golden West (2004) and Far de Donna (2005) at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.

Valérie Mréjen, born in Paris in 1969, is a writer, visual artist, photographer, video artist and short filmmaker. Mréjen uses all of these media to explore language, childhood and her memories. Her videos are farcical sketches of daily life that draw attention to the game between words and stories. Fixed shots, actors who do not try to act, neutral backdrops and dialogues in which nothing extraordinary is discussed are the constants in her work.

…but I was only acting! features a series of single-channel screenings that explore the connections between acting (as in performance) and activism from the lens of humour and irony. On this basis, the artists chosen for the programme represent a kind of transcendence with respect to the social framework in which they create, according to the idea established by radical activist and historian Howard Zinn in his book Artists in Times of War. For Zinn, “the artist thinks, acts, performs music, and writes outside the framework that society has created.” He goes on to clarify that “artists can be sly. They

Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1893 - 1941 is the first comprehensive retrospective of American avant-garde film before the 1940s. The complete programme includes 160 35 and 16 mm films, between new restorations and preserved copies, of which the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía is presenting a selection of 36 films. Unseen Cinema explores the achievements - unknown to date - of pioneer filmmakers who worked in and outside the United States during the formative period of North American cinema.

The series Animated Sessions, which complements the exhibition of the same name, offers a brief overview of animation today in eight video programmes that feature the work of artists in this field like Manu Arregui (Santander, 1970), Feng Mengbo (Beijing, 1966), Liane Lang (Munich, 1973) and Jordi Moragues (Barcelona, 1970). The selection includes different styles and techniques - from drawing to modelling, 3D animation and digital applications - and considers a variety of narrative structures and themes in order to draw closer attention to the careers of some of the artists who primarily use this medium, thus offering a perspective on animation within the contemporary art scene.

We Are the World is a series that features works by young artists who share the common ground of being multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multinational and are also alike that in none of them live in their home country for more than short periods at a time. Drawing on this pluralistic outlook, these creators tackle a series of common problems arising from the need to confront the past and the present by telling stories (real and/or fictional) that reveal their anxieties, hopes, cultural inheritance, political or social conflicts, and, last but not least, their reaction to the fact that they are part of the first real generation of ‘global youth’. The works by these artists offer deep reflections about youth in the world today, at the same time that they provide some perspective on the new world, one that rises above borders, nationalities and differences.

The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía presents an audiovisual series on the relationship between video and music curated by Bob Nickas, a pioneer in experimental video clips during the early years of MTV in the 1980s. At the end of the 70s, the punk, no wave and performance art era, there was a general conviction that video clips had a commercial function only aimed at promoting and selling records. Art never formed part of the original equation. However, at times, music groups from the art world would choose an artist to direct their videos and they would go on to produce something that was much more than a commercial tool, raising the level of the invention and the visual sophistication. One such case is the collaboration between Sonic Youth and the artists Tony Oursler (New York, 1957) and Richard Kern (North Carolina 1954), and with the filmmakers Todd Haynes (Los Angeles, 1961) and Harmony Korine (Bolinas, 1973), to give only one example. In contrast, since the 1990s, the influence of music on young video artists has been considerable. For many of them, music and sound are central elements in their work, when they are not forming the very subject of the piece.

The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía has chosen nine films from contemporary cinema as part of the summer film programme presented as an alternative to more commercial circuits. Some of the most emblematic films from contemporary French cinema are represented by directors like Jean-Luc Godard (Paris, 1930), Agnès Varda (Brussels, 1928) and the couple Jean-Marie Straub (Metz, 1933) / Danièle Huillet (Paris, 1936 - Cholet, 2006). Bruce Weber (Greensburg, 1946) and Matthew Barney (San Francisco, 1967) offer alternative poetics from American film, while the acclaimed Jia Zhangke (Fenyang, 1970) comes to the museum’s screens with his tale of a changing China, The World (2004).

The work of Javier Viver (Madrid, 1971) takes advantage of a variety of media including sculpture, photography and video. Appropriating resources from industry and show business, he creates interdisciplinary spectacles about exile and the ephemeral nature of things that highlight the desolation and great internal contradictions of modern man.

Since its earliest days, British television has served as a reference point for creative dialogue between contemporary art and television. As early as 1938, the artist and critic John Piper (Epsom, 1903; - Fawley Bottom, 1992) was appearing in a studio to talk about modern art. Today, the means of broadcast and reception have become decentralised and fragmented. Television as the supreme medium of directed mass culture is in decline and its audience, which was once captive, is dispersed among hundreds of satellite and cable channels, DVDs, videogames and 3G mobile phones. The moment when leisure time was filled with the great cultural television projects that so distinguished the second half of the 20^th century will not be repeated. Remote Control features a selection of some of the most historical moments in the history of the relationship between art and television.

El futuro más acá is a film series that brings together a selection of Mexican films that between 1945 and 1980 explored science fiction themes from a point of view very different from that of the discourse dominating the genre in the United States.

Prison of Love is an interdisciplinary project that raises the possibility of artistically and culturally representing a complex set of aspects around the topic of domestic/gender violence. The title is not accidental; it is taken from an epistolary novel with a tragic end by Diego de San Pedro (Seville, 1492), whose beliefs and point of view could well symbolise, both literally and figuratively, fear of the patriarchal system in the 21^st century. With five interconnected sections (a film and video programme, web project, performance piece, conferences and a publication) and conceived as a space distinguished by its diversity of opinions and points of view, Prison of Love runs the risk of being perceived as lacking rigor, confronting as it does a topic that is both broad and brutal. Far from assuming that ‘anything goes’, this project, which was put together over a period of almost two years, is based on the concept that artistic and cultural codes are collective representations and that their form and content are shaped by and for the social order.