The Tide of Images
A film archive in Nairobi;after images of the Chernobyl desaster;life in New Orleans with haunting memories of "Katrina". Defying the common idea of an inexhaustible archive of images, the three films in this program are telling of a condition which we thought didn't exist anymore in times of total visibility: that images fail us. The tide of images reveals that when images fail us storytelling sets in. "The essence of the archive are its gaps", said Georges Didi-Huberman, and the same is probably true about memory.
A Third Version of the Imaginary
A THIRD VERSION OF THE IMAGINARY traces an encounter with the video and film library of the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation in Nairobi. The camera follows the station’s librarian on his search for a specific image. As he moves among tightly-packed shelves of video cassettes, a Swahili voice-over speaks about the arrival of video technology in Kenya and its impact on the archiving of television images. While the narrating voice tries to account for the cultural role of the archive, it repeatedly stumbles over a blank in its own vocabulary: in Swahili there is no general word for "image", dissociated from the material its captured on.
- Kenia, Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika
- 00:12:00
- Director: Benjamin Tiven
- Production: Benjamin Tiven
- Photography: Jim Bishop
Benjamin Tiven - Editing: Benjamin Tiven
- Music: Hsi-Chang Lin
- Sound: John Kagu
Matthew Girard - Languages: sw
- Subtitles: en
- Year: 2012
- Website
Anteroom of the Real
How to describe what's happening here? Image by image a film emerges while a stack of photographs is being reduced from top to bottom. Two hands are doing the work, giving us an unstable amount of seconds for each photograph before pulling it away to reveal the one underneath. Like falling leaves the gestures gradually add up to a picture story of a place where nobody has been in a long time, but to which memory is forced to return again and again – even the memory of those who don't know exactly where that place is. Pripyat, a town in the quarantine zone around Chernobyl.
- Schweden
- 00:14:16
- Director: Lina Selander
- Production: xxxx
- Photography: xxxx
- Editing: xxxx
- Music: xxxx
- Sound: xxxx
- Year: 2012
As she left
"What had taken a life-time to build, was swept away in a second. From one moment to the next everything was flooded." Somewhere in the heart of loss the narrator found something she could relate to in the tales of those who had witnessed the flood in New Orleans. AS SHE LEFT is a brave and captivating attempt to salvage from the stories about "Katrina" something that touches the core of our togetherness. Years after the desaster, of which we mainly remember victimizing television images of people on roofs, every new image relating to the event is necessarily a political one. Because it alludes to something that will remain unspeakable, sealed in the minds of those who were in New Orleans during those days and who saw themselves become islands of memory in a sea of oblivion.
- Belgien
- 00:38:00
- Director: Alexandra Kandy Longuet
- Production: Veronique Duys
- Photography: Caroline Guimbal
- Editing: Agathe Hervieu
- Music: Ronell "Roo" Johnson
- Sound: Alexandra Kandy Longuet (sound)
Simon Jamart (mixing) - Languages: en,fr
- Subtitles: en
- Year: 2012
- Golden Key