On the 22nd of March 1895, at Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris, ownersof the Lumière factories Auguste and Louise Lumière, projected for the first-time images inmotion – showing factory workers leaving the factory. The witnesses of this new spectacle:funders and friends of the Lumière’s, the bourgeois community of the French society. Historyhas named this moment as the birth of cinema. But what actually took place there was theconfrontation of the objects in the film – the workers – with subjects of the cinema – thesponsors –, the confrontation of the lower social class with the higher and the rich. Workersleaving the Factory! Subject and object, spectator and actor changed their positions. Theworkers (as Georges Didi-Huberman has put it) “changed their figurant status” into activeelements. No extras, but the main act. The films in this program have been programmed inspiredby the above-mentioned event. In the four films of this program categories begin to shift,genres melt, the audience moves. The spectator becomes an actor, a witness – the films in thisprogram take the audience as their subject. The border between behind and in front of thecamera vanishes, the system of inside and outside the screen become meaningless. (AzinFeizabadi) CN: This program contains explicit depiction or mention of physical, psychologicalor sexual violence.
According to Thai superstition, a virgin can ward off rain by planting lemongrass upside-down underneath an open sky. This belief remains prevalent to this day. As clouds begin to gather, a young production manager on a film set is tasked to carry out this tradition. As her fellow female co-workers shy away from the duty, she is left with no choice but to take on the burden of becoming the lemongrass girl.… >>>
Set in a fictitious lunar base Nagasaki, HONEYMOON is the Japanese director Yu Araki’s take on Japonisme. He re-examines and re-interprets the wedding scene from Madame Butterfly (dir. Carmine Gallone, 1954), where B.F. Pinkerton sits in seiza (正座), which is the Japanese term used for the proper, formal traditional way of sitting by kneeling on the floor and have legs folded underneath the thighs. Although seiza-style is widely known as “correct”, it didn’t permeate until after Japan opened up to the Occident, that is, after the culture of the “chair” had taken hold, hence the formality of what the Japanese thought had long history was only a modern, arbitrary construct. Inspired by this historical fact, Araki connects seiza with another element to contemplate the arbitrariness of humanity: constellation, which, incidentally, is a homonym with seiza (星座) in the Japanese language. In addition, the aforementioned film Madame Butterfly has been known as one of the most iconic collaborations between Italy and Japan, with a strong intention from the Japanese production side to “correct” the twisted imagery of Japanese depiction in which they succeeded. However, Araki critically poses the question of what does it mean to understand another culture “correctly”.… >>>
CN: This program contains explicit depiction or mention of physical, psychological or sexual violence. I document my time with a washed-up dishonest constable and his troop of two, in this self-reflexive re-imagining of a police documentary. After the death of both my grandfathers I returned to ‘Jalandhar’, where this film is set and also where I was born, with the idea of making a film about the temptations of law enforcement in modern-day India. But very quickly I was overwhelmed by a magnificent sense of grief. And then a thought struck me: a documentary can be about many different things but can it also be about a feeling? Can it represent the incomprehensible and abstract quality of grief? As I reflected on these thoughts while gathering raw material on the Punjab Police, it only felt right to insert myself and my family into this dynamic of cruelty and exploitation.… >>>
Video, sound, text. Seminar room, bullet points. Narrator, gestures, QR code. Distance from white guilt, malaise. Scales of death, datedness. Zoom out, in, out (as nobody is pure, the contradictions in striving toward an ethics of practice are insurmountable). Big drop. Scream.… >>>