INDEPENDENT FILM SHOW 9th EDITION
3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 november 2009
Fondazione Morra
Palazzo Ruffo di Bagnara Piazza Dante, 89 Napoli
Acts (un)framed by Elisabeth Lebailly
Morgan Fisher Films by Stoffel Debuysere & Maria Palacios Cruz
(DE)CODING by Stoffel Debuysere & Maria Palacios Cruz
Films & Performance Pascal Baes & Aï Suzuki
The rhythms of Absolute Cinema by Raffaella Morra
As if its originality and value were not reason enough to admire the Independent Film Show, there is also something else: the opportunity to experience the unexpected. A chance of enchantment, in a particular space, render it exemplary, ideal. Not passively seated before a picture, but getting into the heart of a work, passing through it with the sensation of falling inside a vision - we perceive the transit, we hear the whispers, we interrupt the silences, we undergo the perceptive shock of it all.
The amount of attention paid to the moving images has actually increased over the past ten years, if that seems possible. This may be due to increased artistic production and the appearance of newly-created archives and databases. These latter are often ambiguous affairs, adding little to a clear understanding of the work or its historical and artistic context. What makes the Independent Film Show unique in its field, however, is the detailed look it takes at one particular aspect of cinema - that of the independent and experimental.
The Independent Film Show 9th, organized by E-M Arts and co-ordinate by Raffaella Morra and Katia Rossini, will take place from the 3rd to the 7th of November 2009 at the Fondazione Morra (Palazzo Ruffo di Bagnara, Piazza Dante 89).
The Independent Film Show is also a chance for an informal discussion between curators, film-makers and spectators. The website www.em-arts.org will be newly updated and a colour catalogue in English and Italian will be published with texts by Loredana Troise, the curators and details of all 42 films in the program.
Acts (un)framed, selected by Elisabeth Lebailly, combines performance to experimental film. At its very core, the performance affects the constraints of art institution and shakes its audience. Interestingly, the notion of performance, and everything it comprises, inspires an interrogation of limits. It becomes an investigation into the possibility of reinventing language. To accomplish this, physical expression and body work open an infinite path, essential to our relationship with the world, a channel for creativity and observation. These films are interacting art forms that touch on themes of psychiatry, technicisation, work, social well-being, and the relationship to oneself or the other… Most of the films selected for this programme come from the Nomadic Video Library, an alternative distribution project in Belgium.
The second program, curated by Stoffel Debuysere and Maria Palacio Cruz members of the Belgian Courtisane collective, brings together a selection of Morgan Fisher’s films (he will be in Napoli), rarely seen in Europe and most of which will be screened in Italy for the first time. Fisher plays with the concepts of film, cinema and filmmaking, creating a unique and intimate view of cinema and its physical representation. Beginning with Fisher’s first work as a film-maker in 1968, The Director and His Actor Look at Footage Showing Preparations for an Unmade Film (2), the selection spans two decades of work, between 1968 and 1984. Fisher’s films are an exploration of the film apparatus and its physical material, as well as of movie-making production methods: from film’s standard gauge (35mm) to the use of production stills, the narrative role of inserts and the invisible importance of the projectionist.
(DE)CODING, curated by Stoffel Debuysere and Maria Palacio Cruz, propose a playful approach to concerns generally associated with structural film; these works ask the viewer to take up, within the practice of spectatorship, an expansive attitude towards the creation of meaning. We are invited to participate and solve perceptual puzzles, interpret them, and above all construct unity out of their diversity. The films by Thom Andersen & Malcolm Brodwick, Morgan Fisher, Robert Nelson and Hollis Frampton (all five Americans) and British film-maker John Smith are works that explore the power of a rule as a structuring principle of montage, suggesting possible new meanings that result from the reordering of images and sounds.
Pascal Baes, a trained biologist, painter and photographer, has chosen to focus on cinema, experimenting extensively with stop-motion technique and specialising in image-by-image animation. By filming all frames separately, making use of long exposures and slow shutter speeds, and freezing movement and reanimation, he creates the staccato-effect which has become his trademark. In his films rarely seen in Italy, Baes attempts to further extract the relationship between movement, image and time in cinematographic forms running parallel to our contemporary rhythm of life and our perception.
Pascal Baes and his life companion Aï Suzuki will participate in a wordless performance aiming for an uprooting and a deconstruction of space and time.
Absolute Cinema attempts to be dynamic and not a mere reproduction of the natural world. Cleansed of unnecessary formal and aesthetic elements, it creates a succession of unexpected images which the viewer has to learn to recognise. The rhythms of Absolute Cinema, curated by Raffaella Morra, shows a digression into abstraction: from the film Symphonie Diagonale 1924 by Viking Eggeling, to the experiments of Mary Ellen Bute, Len Lye, Harry Smith, Marie Menken, and Robert Breer. Investigating the evocative world of Absolute Cinema, which combines the immaterial nature of light with cultural complexity and possible mental connections, it leads towards the evolution and development of new research and experimentation, exemplified in the films realized by Joost Rekveld, Leonardo Carrano & Alessandro Pierattini, and Thomas Draschan.