Film and Video

The world is not perfect, although it can and must change to adjust to the needs of the moment and the people who inhabit it. This is the conceptual framework of Misura italiana, the video art series organised by the Centro per l'arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci-Prato for the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.

Singular Multitude: The Art of Resistance is an ambitious series that includes conferences, a performance piece and a selection of audiovisual works that reflect the desire of their creators to investigate the unlimited possibilities found on the edges of official taste and the socio-political circumstances of the present day, all while recalling events, revealing traumas, mediating memory and producing counterimages in contemporary society and art.

Hunger (2008) is the first feature-length film directed by the British artist Steve McQueen (London, 1969), one of the most influential directors in the United Kingdom. The film depicts life in Maze Prison in Northern Ireland during the IRA hunger strike led by Bobby Sands in 1981. With an epic sense of detail, the film offers an opportune exploration of what happens when both mind and body are taken to the limit.

Somewhere between documentary and film essay, Double Take (2009) presents Alfred Hitchcock - and his doppelganger Ron Burrage - as a paranoid history professor unwillingly trapped between archive images of the Cold War and the broadcast of a live television programme.

The works of Vasco Araújo (Lisbon, l975) focus on socio-political aspects and investigate the problematics of identity and memory using classical mythology, opera, Baroque dance, palace protocol and social behaviours.

In the words of Gilles Deleuze, everyone has his south - it doesn't matter where it is. In the imaginary cartography of the global order, the idea of south presents itself as a powerful metaphor that acts on two fronts.

Pablo Helguera (Mexico City, 1971) is an artist based in New York whose work emphasises socio-political reality and delves into the nature of memory. He uses language and historical narrative, availing himself of theatrical and literary resources that he then transposes into conceptual language.

Visionaries - Audiovisual Works in Latin America is an eclectic exhibition that is full of vitality and deeply committed to audiovisual creation in Latin America. The series looks at Latin American experimental video and film from Mexico to the countries of the Southern Cone in a combination of screenings and conferences that put everything from pioneers in experimental film to more recent productions under the historical lens. Organised by Brazil’s Instituto Itaú Cultural, the series consists of 73 works grouped into nine programmes.

Fragments of the East. Performance Art and Feminist Discourse (1968-1989) is a video and conference series on the origin of feminist discourse in the artistic practice in three historical contexts with no public sphere. As artists beginning within the framework of the communist dictatorships of Romania, the former Yugoslavia and Poland, Geta Brătescu (Ploiesti, 1926), Sanja Iveković (Zagreb, 1929) and Ewa Partum (Grodzisk, 1945) created works that question artistic specificity and autonomy at the same time that they allude to repressive contexts and the subject’s capacity for transformation and representation in works of art.

The films of the multifaceted Swiss artist Hannes Schüpbach (Winterthur, 1965) start from a direct encounter with a place or person and take the depiction to the limits of the metaphor. His latest works, Verso (2008) - starring his father - and L’Atelier (2007), are being screened along with Spin (2001), an earlier film with the artist’s mother.

Film has made its way into museums and galleries at the same time that art has opened up avenues in the world of film. Exhibition spaces often host multimedia installations, experimental film sessions and even narrative films. In their quest to integrate image, sound and movement, more and more artists are turning to cinema as a means of expression, exploring experimental abstraction, documentary and narrative fiction.

Lillian Ball, an artist and environmental activist who has received numerous awards from institutions like the Guggenheim Foundation and the United States National Endowment for the Arts, has dedicated a large part of her work to protecting the wetlands.

Cuando la tierra tiembla (2006) is a visual document of the human drama of exile, migration and displacement. The video draws on the circumstances of the Mexican community residing in New York to look at the situation of emigrants on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Their testimonies, along with those of members of associations who work with ‘illegals,’ form the central thread that runs through the story.

India is a place of abundant contrasts: part of the population lives in full post-modernity, modernity can still be found in another, while another segment - perhaps the majority of the population - lives anchored in feudalism. From a western standpoint, Indian film is a complex thing that breaks with the aesthetic codes and parameters established in the West in its themes and forms. Understanding it means delving into the culture and idiosyncrasy of its peoples.

In Freedom Park, a squatter settlement in South Africa, a group of HIV-infected women created a network called Tapologo. Working with nurses from their community, they transformed misery and degradation into resistance and hope. Catholic bishop Kevin Dowling helped them, raising doubts about the sexual and moral doctrine of the Church in this context.

The camera never stops moving while it follows the operation of emptying the Huerta de San Vicente of all of its contents - paintings, furniture, rugs, flowerpots, knickknacks, a piano - leaving it clean and bare, and accompanying the objects wrapped in semi-transparent plastic to a storage site where they are placed in a pile.

The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía presents a selection of works from the Colección Pi Fernandino in Madrid, one of the few private collections that concentrates on works done in audiovisual format from recent decades.

The concept and evolution of television ads produced by political organisations and parties during electoral campaigns have changed noticeably since they first appeared in the United States in the 1960s. Today, campaign ads have become a hybrid genre, the product of the convergence of different television formats ranging from advertisements, to fiction, documentaries, news reporting, music videos, political propaganda, parodies and sports and music events.

New York, February 1963. Jack Smith (Columbus, 1932 - New York, 1989), Tony Conrad (Concord, 1940), and Henry Flynt (Greensboro, 1940) protest outside the Met, MoMA and Lincoln Center carrying signs that read: “Demolish Serious Culture! Demolish Art Museums! Demolish Concert Halls!” “Making art was never supposed to be easy. It really has to be very boring. It must become very, very boring.”

Constanze Ruhm (Vienna, 1965) is an artist and filmmaker whose work looks at the relationship between film and the new media from the viewpoint of the ideas of feminist film theory, representation and identity. The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía presents, for the first time in Spain, her film X Love Scenes (2007), the fifth in the X Characters series, which she began in 2001.

The term performance art in Chinese (xingwei yishu) translates as ‘conduct or behaviour in art,’ an idea that emphasises the relationship of the individual to the community, which is so fundamental in the history of social and political thought in China. In this ‘behaviour art,’ personal and group commitment exceeds artistic parameters to fully enter the field of ethics and philosophy. Art/Action China presents a look at action art through interviews carried out between 2005 and 2007 with two generations of artists who work with installation, conceptual art, photography, video and performance art. Cang Xin (Heilongjiang, 1967), Zhu Ming (Changsha, 1972) Song Dong (Beijing, 1966), the pair of Sun Yuan (Beijing, 1972) & Peng Yu (Heilongjiang, 1974), Li Wei (Hubei, 1970), He Yunchang (Yunnan, 1967) and Chen Lingyang (Yiwu, 1975) explain the close relationship between their work and the political, social and urban changes that Chinese society has experienced over the last three decades. All the artists are determined to meld art with life and share the desire to have an impact on their social environment using means that are as poetic as they are subversive.

May 2008 marked the fortieth anniversary of the largest general strike in the history of France, and the only widespread insurrection in a developed capitalist society in the second half of the twentieth century. ‘Reactive memory’ (political, media-driven, cultural) downplays the importance of May ’68 by reducing it to a student revolt, a generational conflict, a sudden acceleration of modernity (the explosion of hedonist individualism, liberation from tradition), etc. In the face of this current attempt to de-politicise the event, In and Against Cinema. Around May ’68 seeks to awaken a contrary and conflictive memory, that of the search for political spaces outside, on the margins of and against institutional politics. This search did not just take place in the field of organised struggle, but it influenced filmmaking in equal measure, perhaps more than any other cultural form or language.

Since the 1970s, Marcel Odenbach (Cologne, 1953) has had a decisive influence on the development of video, using the qualities and possibilities offered by the medium to make political and social statements. “From the very start of my career as a video artist, I took the recording of moving pictures for granted,” says Odenbach.

This cycle presents the VIVA video art festival programme, dedicated to exploring the increasingly intense dialogue between the art and audiovisual worlds from the perspective of the viewing context of movies theatres, which is more traditional than the spaces provided by museums and exhibitions.

The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía dedicates a retrospective to the audiovisual work of Yvonne Rainer (San Francisco, 1934), a key figure in experimental film in the San Francisco Bay Area and then in the East Coast underground scene after she moved to New York in the 1950s.

Presented by the psychoanalyst and philosopher Slavoj iek (Ljubljana, 1949) and directed by Sophie Fiennes (Suffolk, 1967), The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006) follows the philosopher as he examines films like The Exorcist (1973), Duck Soup (1933) and Alien (1979), speaking from replica sets of classic films like Psycho (1960), Blue Velvet (1986) and The Matrix (1999).

Why not short films? is a series of screenings and a roundtable designed to put the spotlight on the short film format, a form that reveals the new relationships that artists and filmmakers have with the audiovisual medium and the world around them from the perspective of young, mainly Spanish creators who have come to short films from the cinema. The Great Ways agency, a specialist in cultural events for twelve years, collaborated on the selection.

Braaaasiiiil is a series of films, videos, concerts and performance pieces all about the vast world of contemporary Brazilian society, put together during the course of 2007 by the audiovisual department with the assistance of Maria Helena Leitão and Raquel Hallak.

The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía is holding its seventh Film and Almost Film series, an annual event created to showcase the most notable contemporary audiovisual trends. This year’s series is made up of 11 programmes with a total of 36 pieces, including most notably After Apocalypse Now: Martin Sheen (The Soldier) (2007), which Cabello (Paris, 1963)/Carceller (Madrid, 1964) are screening for the first time.

Viaje de novios (2006) is a project that developed over the course of almost three years. It includes four videos (Viaje de novios, Pago de salud, Circular de agua and Baile al fin) which together form one long piece. This long version of Viaje de novios looks at some of the key spaces in art and cinema: the portrait suspended in time; the landscape as aspiration, between memory and desire; the artistic gaze and its film correlation in the shot/reverse angle shot; using a couple as an editing principle; telling a story that tempers the real events and the narrative voice. “The experience of travelling, time passing, events that surprise us, the restlessness that finds its place in art, all find closure in the artwork, which is simultaneously formalised as just one more displacement” Javier Codesal (Sabiñánigo, 1958).

In 1984, a group of students in the city of Bonn founded the Videonale, a video festival that reflected the creative possibilities of the medium. After more than 20 years, this festival has become one of the most important and innovative international events dedicated to contemporary video. Despite its age, the Videonale remains faithful to its principles: the free participation of artists in the competition with a single-channel piece made during the two years before the call for entries, its international character, and selection by a jury of independent international experts.

This series spotlights the film work of Peter Downsbrough (New Brunswick, 1940), an artist better known for his pieces made with black tape and letters, the map pieces, his books and scale models. However, his audiovisual work was prolific between 1976 and 2006, during which time he produced 21 films and videos.

The artist Perry Bard (Quebec, 1944), whose work draws on the use of electronic media, is presenting the audiovisual series In Perfect Disorder, a look at the ties between society, aesthetics and technology from the viewpoint of video creation. The programme, which includes pieces like Technology /Transformation: Wonder Woman (Dara Birnbaum, 1978-79), Feeling Free with 3D Magic Eye Poster Remix (Shana Moulton, 2004) and Escenario (Gabriel Acevedo Velarde, 2004), brings together ten artists who use different strategies to examine social, technological and aesthetic systems that are characterised by the repetition and regularity of their dynamics and by their methodical and constant use of internal logic to obtain predictable results. The videos use techniques including found footage, algorithms, rituals, performance pieces and a good dose of humour to call these results into question.

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.