Activities

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.