Break Even Concept Store, IFFR 2010

To explore some of these issues I raised in my look at how Rotterdam International Film Festival has changed, and to look at how festivals can operate now and respond to the current climate, I talked with the curator Edwin Carels who has contributed innovative programmes and exhibitions to the Rotterdam over the years. Coming from the visual arts, his projects play a fundamental role to counter-point the film focus of the festival and propose new models for how work is made, shown and disseminated. This year his project, Break Even, took the form of a pop-up store in the heart of the festival. Using this model he paralleled the festival’s various facets, from its mainstay of screenings and discussions, to his shop market, which paralleled the long running co-production market Cinemart.

How did the project come about?

Every year the festival has a big thematic programme and the central idea this year was to go online – to have a 2.0 festival with the Cinema Reloaded project to co-produce films by buying coins online as well as using YouTube as a platform. Which is relevant, obviously – it’s very topical at this moment. But what is it really about? It’s really about the economy of images, it’s about new forms of production and presentation of images and I think that is absolutely something that needs to be addressed.

So I said maybe my shop idea would work in a complimentary way to that, to present the other side. This project is resolutely off-line. I want people to come here to buy and to discover that which is peripherally in their vision and also discover other people. So I went for it. As with Kino Climates, the idea was there, but I argued that this should be part of Cinema Reloaded, as it’s another form of economic survival within a very different kind of situation. So these projects are a combination of different approaches to the central question of the festival.

How important is the location for this project – to be situated here in the centre of Rotterdam and amongst the festival venues, rather than in one of the galleries south of the centre?

As well as the online project, another inclination of our relatively new director is the desire for the marginal to be in the centre. So he was adamant about having Kino Climates in the centre at the Schouwburg, not in Lantaren/Venster. When we went looking for a site I was assuming that there would be plenty of bankrupt or empty storefronts, yet this location, which was the most central, wasn’t bankrupt! This location had been used to sell the most expensive flats in Holland, which are still to be built. I’m very happy with the location, its really key to the success.

It seems that even within this small space you’ve managed to make a parallel or replica of the whole festivals and its different sub sections?

Well for me that’s it – a shop can be sort of emblematic for the festival. We want to be on ground level, so we’re not hiding or doing elitist things. I think this festival is a non-red carpet festival, which I really like, but at the same time we don’t compromise on our tastes. If it’s all obscure names then it’s all obscure names, and you just learn to pronounce them and be excited by them.

I’ve learned my marketing terms – so my ‘bubble plan’ – which is how you organise stores – is just what I think is relevant now – in my opinion. So as a programmer, I’ve compiled shelves, rather than films in a theatre, though it’s the same principle.

I heard that Eisenstein did the same with his bookshelves and he really had an order for how to match this and that. So there is a kind of editing going on in that sense, and a reshuffle everyday. But I’ve also invited a lot of people to contribute – I said, bring your suitcase, I’ll give you some money, surprise me. And I’m amazed by what people have sent. There is this whole generosity thing going on. I used the money that I normally get to make an exhibition or film programme to develop this concept and I’ve already broken even, more or less on day one. All the rest is just a kind of bonus, as we don’t have to make a profit.

It seems like this project is very much about acknowledging the underlying presence of the market at film festivals?

Absolutely. I mean they call it the industry! Amongst ourselves, and in Cinemart, it’s nothing but economic talk, but for the public it’s just not apparent. I mean, it is for big American productions, but for art house films there are just as many economic concerns. It’s all about economy, as is the whole internet thing. That’s why getting away with the title of the store, Break Even, was already half the job done. Everyone talks about how they have to break even… it’s a purely economic term.

So it’s a concept store in the sense that I don’t mind if I sell a lot or not. I think the meeting ground is important, sharing this idea and pointing towards it is important.

Most filmmakers don’t earn a living from their work, so they have to apply for funds, etc. So this is not going to make a difference to their career apart from the fact that they want to be part of this environment. Content wise, I haven’t compromised. For very personal reasons I’m happy to change after doing so many exhibitions in the past to another location – it’s a new challenge and set of parameters. It’s fun! And also a programme of films, an exhibition, live events – they are now all in here.

Do you think that this project is also a reflection on the position of artists’ work within a festival like Rotterdam?

Well, there’s little other art in the festival this year and that unfortunately has to do with the credit crunch and sponsorship, etc. Once I got the idea and I knew I could develop it I started looking around and talking to people. It is a format, the pop-up shop is a viable format because you don’t pay rent for very long, you don’t pay staff longer than necessary. In the art world you see a lot of that, exhibitions of self-publishing, etc. I brought some of the stuff at PS1 during this big New York art book fair, there were amazing things. I mean it’s not about books there either; it’s about lots of different multiples. So this cottage industry is increasingly important.

But what do you think the status is when a cottage industry is incorporated into the institutions of art?

You could consider my role within the festival as that of a jester! I seem to be contracting the argument of Cinema Reloaded but at the same time strengthening it. I see it as a complimentary action. For instance, yesterday we had Vincent Meessen presenting his new work with 10 people and talking for two hours afterwards only about semiotics, Roland Barthes and Africa in a wonderful exchange with Kevin Jerome Everson. And if you can do that in the heart of the festival, here, between the Doelen and the Pathe, if we can talk about Barthes for two hours, that’s great, that’s generous. For me it’s a most happy experience because of the direct interaction.

Artists work often seems to challenge the structure and preconceptions that festivals have about what work is and how it can or should be presented – how do you understand the position of artists’ work at film festival?

I’m very happy about the position that I can take – maybe I don’t have a position, I don’t have a territory, I’m not [representing] Sweden, Germany, Austria and have to scout there. Every year I try out new formats, that I think are topical, of this moment – so that’s why I’ve done programmes on music, and on television, because there was a cultural relevance to the technology. It’s basically more of a Cinema Regained programme here; it’s homage to those disappearing stores. In our daily ‘trade paper’ Unfinished Business we have the story about Kim’s Video, the Mecca for New Yorkers, that is now gone, it’s in Sicily, an Italian bought it and now it’s gone. There was a shop in Brussels, Le Bonhier, The happiness, which had been there for 15 years and you went in and brought the taste of the guy, it could be chocolate, it could be DVDs, books, but also children’s toys. I like those places but they are disappearing because of the Internet, because of online stores.

The project seems to be true to the idea that the role of festivals is to propose different structures for how culture can be configured understood and produced?

Yes. I used to programme the Exploding Cinema section, but we had to explode that, and we’re trying out new formats and asking, well, is this viable? Interesting? A lot of people from a lot of festivals have seen this now, so you never know. It’s also a take on branding, there is no Tiger – the festival logo – in the store. We did tap into the house style with the Break Even logo so on many levels there’s a play with the components of the festival and that is part of the joke! It’s problematising it and at the same time trying to use and understand it. That’s why I showed Farocki’s The Creators of Shopping Worlds (2001)  on the first day so you actually get a crash course in how to do it. In the evening we had a crash course in becoming a pickpocket. So the whole give and take; theory and practice.

Depending on how deep you want to dive into the layers of the concept, you could actually just stumble in here like some police officers did and curiously look around but leave with something in your hands or you can see it as being a performance. There have been many examples before, like Vito Acconci’s bookstore for Documenta was a great one. I’m not reinventing the wheel here, that’s why I only want to do it now, within the framework of the larger theme it makes sense to do this. We had lots of lucky moments with the programming with the settling of the urban estate office and someone just brought Tati’s Playtime which is perfect!

The corporate steel and glass location is an unusual place for a screening especially the difficulty to create a blackout, for one screening here light and shadows kept coming in from the street outside…

Yes, extra shadow play! I’m happy that people are open to it and the artists are not anal about super perfect conditions, there are more important things than that. One of the best comments came from curator Mark McElhatten at the end of that night, “The setting was far from perfect but it was ideal!”

About the Author: George Clark is a curator, writer and artist. At the Independent Cinema Office between 2006 and 2008 he managed a range of touring projects including: ‘Essentials: The Secret Masterpieces of Cinema‘, ‘Artists & Icons’ and ‘The Artists Cinema 2006′. Independent curatorial projects include ‘The Unstable States of…’, ‘Without Boundaries: European Artists’ Film and Video’ and the retrospective ‘The Cinema of Miklos Jancso’ [co-curated with Travis Miles]. He has written for Art Monthly, Afterall, Sight & Sound, Senses of Cinema and Vertigo Magazine among other publications. He is currently collaborating with the artist Beatrice Gibson on the script for a film commissioned by the Serpentine Gallery and Camden Council.

Otolith I - The Otolith Group

George Clark talks to Anjalika Sagar & Kodwo Eshun – The Otolith Group -  following their exhibition at The Showroom, London, about the Otolith Trilogy, their exploration of history, politics and the essay film.

How did The Otolith Group come into being?

Anjalika: We met around 2000 – one of the things that brought us together was Chris Marker (La Jetée, Sans Soleil). When we first met we went to see all these great Chris Marker movies at the ICA. And the other thing that brought us together was Black Audio Film Collective. We both had known them ever since we were 18 or something. We were drawn together by the essay film.

The opportunity arose for us to make a proposal to do a project in zero gravity. And when we started to think about making that film we called ourselves The Otolith Group based on the ideas that we explored in Otolith I (2003). The idea of the Group just gathered momentum after that and all of our different strands of research began to come under the idea of the Otolith Group.

Kodwo: It was always going to be several intertwining practices and then the work somehow sits in the middle of all of that. It’s not enough just to make work after work – there are so many other things that films can do.

Once Otolith I came into existence, it allowed us to do all these other things. So there’s a long gap between Otolith I (2003) and Otolith II (2007), and those four years were taken up doing the Black Audio Film Collective project and publication. Doing that project gave what we do a back story, a significance and a kind of a lineage.

We were never so interested in the kind of Vito Acconci-esque, Bruce Nauman, kind of American post-minimalist art trajectory. And we weren’t so interested in Filmmakers’ Co-op tradition either. It was always this, what Nicole Brenez calls this high international documentary style, which is effectively the kind of experimental documentary or the left wing essay that was always our obsession. So that line that goes from Dziga Vertov through to Chris Marker through to Black Audio Film Collective through to Harun Farocki. Programming films and making exhibitions was a way also of situating ourselves within that.

I think the essay film functions especially well for people who come to film from outside film. Anjalika comes to film from anthropology and I come to film from film theory and literature. I think it suits people like that, of whom there are quite a few it turns out.

How did the experience in microgravity and the historical/future narrative in the film come together in Otolith I?
Anjalika: We had these three areas that we wanted to map – three temporalities. We knew we wanted it to be a science fiction film, we knew that we wanted to create this “from the future”. We did perform loads and loads of actions in the microgravity experience but we only actually used one or two shots. For us it was not just about the experience of experiencing microgravity – it was much more about the metaphor of that experience, the notion of a suspension of political will.

Otolith I - The Otolith Group

What about the biographic elements in this film, especially the use of the story of your grandmother, Anjalika?
Anjalika: Well it’s not just simple biography. The reason that we’ve chosen to talk about real events is because of the fact that these histories, these personal memoirs relate to big and great historical moments and the, let’s say, parallel modernisms in India that haven’t really been explored in the West that much.

Kodwo: Before we first showed Otolith I we presented an earlier version, called Otolith Timeline, at a conference in Rotterdam, with all the people who’d been to Star City in Russia. We did this huge timeline which started from the beginning of the 20th Century with Anjalika’s grandparents; their real historical dates of birth with real historical events that happened to them, and then it went all the way up to the present and then continued past March 2003 into the 22nd Century. It mapped out the whole mythology. So by the time we made Otolith I, it was already an episode from that timeline with a huge back story. So we always knew Otolith II would emerge but we didn’t know exactly what form it would take. Otolith II was conceived at the same time as Otolith I but when it emerged it took a totally different form.

Otolith II (2007) seems to take place in a very concrete world, reliant as it is on observing the duration of labour. It’s very much about the details of process, and is quite different to Otolith I – how did the second film come about?
Anjalika: Well if you think of Otolith I as a film about a state of no gravity, weightlessness. Then I would say that in terms of the kind of gravity, Otolith II is a film based around the idea of an extreme form of pressure. The film is focused on people who live in the slums and have to work under extreme conditions of pressure and labour. We were interested in the labour of watching labour.

Kodwo: The other aspect was looking at the labour of the production of desire through these two advertising sequences and the phenomenal amount of effort required to construct these adverts about financial services which a very small percentage of the Indian population have access to. We really wanted to study this, the labour of creating the promise of the future, which is what adverts do. Adverts make the abstract promise of the future palpable they are a real geometry of desire.

Otolith I is escaping from the pressures of history, and the second one is about being crushed by it – it has an extremely different kind of quality that somehow seemed appropriate for 2007.

We were reading things like Planet of Slums by Mike Davis and we conducted many interviews with people about the future and how they understood the future of the slums. Incidentally, a lot of those sequences were shot in the area where Slumdog Millionaire was filmed. Some of the mega slums are actually areas of potentially the richest real estate in India. The thing about the slums is they are at the centre of competing futures. There’s a city plan for what will happen to them and then there are counter plans by activist architects, and then counter plans to those plans by young architects.

Otolith II is really about the features which are competing to command the narrative of what this city will turn into. Otolith I is about the technology of the master plan and Otolith II is about the technology of speculation and Otolith III is about the technology of pre-emption. And these are all different political ways of capturing futurity and making it safe for capitalism. Speculation is not necessarily visible, so a lot of what we’re interested in isn’t necessarily visible, speculation, master plans, pre-emption, these are abstract modes of power, they’re not things you can easily illustrate, or if you can they wouldn’t be very successful.

Otolith II - The Otolith Group

An issue that comes up repeatedly in your work is the question of how to make productive images, or how can images be approached and understood in new ways.
Kodwo: Yes, exactly, and we spend a lot of time arguing and questioning ourselves about it. You have to think as much about what you want to withdraw, and what you want to subtract, as what you want to add. It’s not necessarily always the case of bringing something new into the world. Sometimes you want to take something out from the world, and in the space that’s left things can happen. In the context of Mumbai it’s over filmed, it’s over imagined, it’s over visualised.

Anjalika: Our cameraman took us to all the places that people want to shoot in when they go there, but we knew “No we’re not going to be able to use any of these!”

Kodwo: You have to think very hard about how your camera can suggest a critique of these other uses that cameras are put to. The reason why the frame cuts up the bodies of these teenage workers is to block visual pleasure, to make it harder for the viewer and to avoid giving the viewer a shortcut to empathy. That’s not to say we succeeded but that’s the proposition we set ourselves at each point.

At each point there’s a decision made to block some kind of tourist gaze. We spent a lot of time thinking “why go all this way to bring images of pauperisation to people in galleries in Europe?” We spend a long time thinking about how to create an image where the image refuses the expectations or refuses the pleasures of what an image is. And I think that’s partly the essayistic. To me, the essayistic is not about a particular generic fascination for voiceover or montage, the essayistic is dissatisfaction, it’s discontent with the duties of an image and the obligations of a sound. It’s dissatisfaction with what we expect a documentary to do especially.

Otolith II - The Otolith Group

One of the striking things about Otolith III in the use of multiple characters bringing all these different presences together, such as the archetypes of ‘the engineer’ and ‘the boy’ but also the Indian film directors Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak. The script for the film is a complex fabric of quotations. How did you go about orchestrating this wide array of voices?
Kodwo: Before we finished Otolith III we did this dialogue at the Serpentine Gallery – at the Manifesto Marathon. I think Anjalika was Ray and I was Ghatak and we were both dead of course.

Anjalika: And the meeting was at this futurological conference, a fictional meeting taken from Stanislaw Lem’s book.

Kodwo: In Lem’s The Futurological Congress it has a date and a place and a name. And so we presented it as if we’d just been at the congress that Lem talks about and we were reminiscing about it but we’re both dead. We both took up these positions of Ray and Ghatak because they represent different trajectories and very different ways of making films. Ray was really such an extreme auteurist that it was just fascinating to stage a conversation where they talk about the productions that never happened. It was a way of speculating without filling in the contents of that speculation.

Our films have folded within them suggestions of mini films, the sequence about the meeting of Ray and Ghatak at Hotel Russell is a mini film by itself. This sequence could travel outside the film and take up another life. In Otolith II there’s a radio sequence where we preview Otolith III with a reading from Ray’s screenplay The Alien. Partly it’s because we have this idea that there are too many films that we will never get to make, and if we can’t make the films at least we can register their non-existence in an episodic form.

I think of Otolith III as a celebration of fleeting potential, especially in the street castings scenes, where the voiceover speculates on the potential of people glimpsed on the street to embody characters from Ray’s screenplay. How did you arrive at this form?
Kodwo: Originally the film was going to be nothing but castings. There is this Pasolini film Notes Towards a Film About India (Appunti per un film sull’India) (1969) which is an exasperating film. Pasolini goes to India and he comes up with this short story of a Maharaja from the 19th Century whose family is struck by famine and he decides to sacrifice himself to a lion to save them. It’s an absurd story but nonetheless Pasolini travelled round cities asking people about this story and looking to cast the characters in it. And this is what we took, not the story but this methodology of travelling the streets, picking faces from the street and changing your mind on them. The voiceover isn’t definitive, it’s a voiceover that crosses itself out and rewrites itself and doubts itself. That’s what we took from Pasolini and that was really fascinating because it means that by the end there’s barely a film at all. What you see is all these possibilities for a film but they’re just that and actually they all get cancelled out. This idea of turning location scouting and street casting, this idea of fictionalising it is brilliant. It’s unbelievable that more people don’t, it seemed to us a kind of unexplored essayistic methodology that is just there and which we could take out.

Otolith III - The Otolith Group

What role does Satyajit Ray’s unmade film The Alien play within Otolith III?
Kodwo: We had no aspirations to make Ray’s film. That seemed totally beside the point. The point was how to pay homage to this definitively unfinished film, how to take this unfinished and unmade status seriously. And how to redeem it. Not to just write it as a failure – because that’s how film history would regard it of course. Film history regards films that are not made as failures.

But there was something about this film that didn’t seem a failure at all. There is a way of narrating the whole story as a kind of cute Hollywood anecdote. Like Ray goes to Hollywood, he meets this person, that person, and Peter Sellers and Steve McQueen. And then it all goes up in smoke and ho, ho it’s a jolly story, and then Spielberg comes along and rips it off. We really didn’t want to narrate it as a kind of missed opportunity, there seemed something much more at stake than that.

The key was how to find this form that could evoke the idea of this definitively unfinished status. And how to say sometimes an unmade film can be just as important if not more important than the many films that are made. One of the things Otolith III does is to explore this through this form of continual discrepancy. So the characters all do the same things but they narrate them differently each time. They can’t agree among themselves at all on this thing that’s happening to them. They say the same things but in totally different ways. In part it was a big experiment for us to work with four voiceovers and to see what happens when we do that.

The centre of the film seems to lie in the collision of these propositions. It’s a more open film than the other two in that way, was it important for the film to have a different atmosphere?

Kodwo: The temperature is very different to Otolith II, even though for us the concerns are continuous. It was a very conscious experiment for ourselves to keep faith with our ideas but also to shift the form with which those ideas are evoked and to see if we could do it. It feels different because of the personification and theoretical positions comes through these characters who aspire to be fictional. And so you get something like characters emerging for the first time in our work. We ask ourselves a lot whether these characters will have to take on bodies and what that will look like. What happens when you attach a voice to a body?

We commissioned lots of drawings of aliens. Anjalika’s father who is drawing in the film is actually drawing aliens, those abstract images are his versions of aliens. We commissioned several images of alien faces and physiognomies but we rejected them all. Because we got closer and closer to the idea in Stalker. The reason why Stalker is so important is because Stalker is the film that solves the dilemma of the alien body. If you have aliens why do they have to have bodies? Why does alien morphology have to be a mirror to us? And Stalker solves it.

Anjalika: With aliens there are no bodies; alien is about atmosphere.

Kodwo: Yeah it’s an atmosphere, it’s a geography, it’s a climate. It’s a climate where magnetic north doesn’t work anymore. The geography is wrong. There are strange pressure shifts, and that seems really powerful to us, just absolutely powerful. Because it seemed to me Stugatski and Tarkovsky had really solved this issue that Hollywood had never been able to solve. Hollywood which had always assumed that aliens have to have bodies and aliens always have to return a gaze. The whole film is about different theoretical positions towards this question.
And all the arguments are about relations to history and that’s the case in all our films. But in Otolith III you can find yourself believing in the fiction and while knowing that the fiction is a personification of the theoretical idea. That seems quite an interesting idea that you can believe in a fiction while you know quite well that the fiction is a theory.

Otolith III - The Otolith Group

One final thing I’m interested in is at what point the three films become a trilogy? And how has that changed your conception of the other films?

Anjalika: Well we actually did like the idea of continuing it on to Otolith 4, 5, 6, 7! But that’s because I think a lot of people don’t want the character of Doctor Usher to die, they want her to transmogrify into something else. With Otolith III we thought that people might be bored with her so we created all these voiceovers, but actually people really miss her! I think the idea of a trilogy was maybe about these kind of particular ideas, maybe finding loops and connections between the films. But you know, we’re not sure yet.

Kodwo: We really like the idea of series. The films lend each other their powers and their forces. They reinforce each other and they hark backwards and call forwards to each other and they reinforce each other in a really good way, and trilogies really work. Especially trilogies over a long distance of time. I think there’s something very moving about a trilogy.

Further information on the Otolith Group can be found here.

About the Author: George Clark is a curator, writer and artist. At the Independent Cinema Office between 2006 and 2008 he managed a range of touring projects including: ‘Essentials: The Secret Masterpieces of Cinema‘, ‘Artists & Icons’ and ‘The Artists Cinema 2006′. Independent curatorial projects include ‘The Unstable States of…’, ‘Without Boundaries: European Artists’ Film and Video’ and the retrospective ‘The Cinema of Miklos Jancso’ [co-curated with Travis Miles]. He has written for Art Monthly, Afterall, Sight & Sound, Senses of Cinema and Vertigo Magazine among other publications. He is currently collaborating with the artist Beatrice Gibson on the script for a film commissioned by the Serpentine Gallery and Camden Council.

Face, Tsai Ming-Laing

Rosemary Heather writes for APEngine on Ernie Gehr, Harun Farocki, Apichatpong Weersethakul, Tsai Ming-Liang and Harmony Korine at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.

For all their stately elegance and clarity of intent, on the whole, the films I saw in the Wavelengths section of TIFF, a series of screenings devoted to avant-garde film, were not involving. The comments I jotted down tell the story. My notes are voluminous. I made jokes and then would write “haha!” when I thought I was being funny. It was like I was ‘live blogging’ (one of the jokes I made…haha). They were the musings of someone venturing to entertain themselves; I was compensating for what wasn’t happening on the screen.

It may be a cheap shot to say I had a good nap during avant-garde film eminence Ernie Gehr’s Waterfront Follies (2009),  but it’s true. Although I knew there was a point to the film’s strategy of presenting long static shots, of a sunset in a bay, somewhere, I struggled to remember what it was. In Gehr’s case, refusing to abide by the conventions of narrative cinema has the value of deepening, and expanding upon, the viewer’s perception of time, and to a certain extent, his film succeeded in having this effect on me. Given the deeply distracted state of a portable-computing-enhanced contemporary existence, it is curious to think there would be no need for an antidote like this. But I would be happy if I never saw Gehr’s film, or any film like it, again.

Even given my apparent unsuitability for such viewing, I am tempted to say that our culture has moved on from the lessons avant-garde cinema has to teach us. But there were films in the Wavelengths screenings that I enjoyed. The TIFF audience was lucky enough to see Titan (2008) by Klaus Lutz, a screening that was dedicated in memorium to the Swiss filmmaker, who died just days before he was about to travel to Toronto for the festival. The film, which features Lutz making his way, sometimes crawling insect-like, through a gorgeous, optically-printed universe, fulfills an ambition close to the heart of the discipline: to recreate cinema in its originary moment, when it is closest to the dream state. Shot in lustrous black and white, Titan is profoundly connected to the now seemingly ancient traditions of the European avant-garde. The announcement of the filmmaker’s death moments before the film’s screening made it all the more otherworldly.  Klaus Lutz (1940-2009) R.I.P.

I also liked the always-terrific Harun Farocki’s In Comparison (2009),  for counter-intuitive reasons. Does a short documentary about methods of brickmaking in different countries have to be boring? Not in Farocki’s case; the exercise was meditative and instructive. Adhering to a brick-like one-after-another structure, In comparison exemplified the ‘show’ rather than ‘tell’ approach to filmmaking. Instead of voice-over narration, Farocki used intertitles with brick diagrams to give his images’ context. Constructing a subtle joke about the very idea of inference, In comparison brings a message about the coherence of a world infused with an everyday intelligence.

In Comparison, Harun Farocki

By far the best film I saw in Wavelengths was A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (2009) by Apichatpong Weersethakul.  In a landscape of pretenders, Weersethakul is the real deal: an artist working at the leading edge of cinematic practice today. Far from keeping his audience at the formalised distance so characteristic of the avant-garde ethos, he makes full use of cinema’s ability to immerse viewers in an experience of time and place. As with Weersethakul’s features, A Letter… is highly evocative of its location (in a luscious, rain-soaked Nabua in northeastern Thailand), but otherwise has little in common with conventional narrative cinema. Lacking the perspective of any view of the horizon, panoramic shots of the jungle work to create an interior space, inside of which the film situates the viewer. Matching the circular movement of the camera is the narrator’s repeat readings of the titular letter. Far from being an exercise in cinematic distanciation, Weersethakul makes believers of us all.

If once abhorred as being complicit with a spectacle-driven mass entertainment industry, the possibilities inherent to cinematic seduction would today seem to offer a viable strategy to the avant-garde – if only because of the level of sophistication such a strategy assumes on the part of its audience. This makes Tsai Ming-Liang‘s Face the best film I saw at TIFF – although saying so is itself controversial, mainly because a number of people I talked to thought it was bad – their verdict, they suggested, backed-up by a more general consensus.  Albeit long and sometimes overwrought, Face is also absurdly ambitious and extravagantly beautiful. How to enumerate its pleasures?

A series of languorous tableaux shot in Taipei, and later in the film, in and around the Louvre (for which it was a commission), Face dazzles because of the faith it invests in the power of the image. Ming-Liang has an extraordinary ability to construct film segments that reward that faith. He then redoubles the compliment, through the assumption he makes that he doesn’t have to explain anything. Aside from tangentially taking place within an imaginative realm governed by the tale of Salomé, Face follows no narrative. All power to an audience that likes their cinema majestically realized and unfettered by any further explanation.

Face succeeds because of what its structure of successive tableaux allows Ming-Liang to get away with: melodrama, grand emotions, stark eroticism. It gives him the freedom to unapologetically create the world he wants. If it happens to be a world fluent in the  aspirational language of globalism at its most perverse – a world of luxury and elitism, blissfully free of any knowledge of the underclass – so be it. That makes Ming-Liang’s film all the more appropriate as a coda to our era.

I liked Face because it affirms the value of beauty in the world, and of material things, as opposed to the infinite regress of irony and the referent. In this sense it shares much in common with Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers (2009), except for the part about beauty, and maybe the irony too – with Korine it’s hard to tell. A polar opposite to Ming-Liang’s film, Trash Humpers would seem to be the product of an auteur who set out to make the worst film he could possibly think of; and in return has received nothing but accolades for his trouble. Korine’s audacity begins with his decision to shoot on VHS and blow it up to a murky 35mm. It continues with the film’s opening sequence: young people made-up to look like old people humping plastic garbage cans. This as-advertised brilliance continues. The Trash Humpers smash things up, and then break into a passable-enough tap dance. Mysteriously absorbing, Korine somehow manages to sustain our interest, in itself a considerable accomplishment, given the ugly look of the film and the behaviour on view.

Trash Humpers, Harmony Korine

Some people have argued that Trash Humpers would work better as an installation, but I think on the contrary it is entirely suited to its presentation as cinema. Filmic duration and a seated (not to say captive – plenty of people left the screening I attended) audience allows it to unfold as if emanating from a recognizable place. The people in it are recognizable too. The poverty of experience on display is after all not so far fetched. You can see it every night on American TV. Notably, on shows like America’s Dumbest Criminals that seem to consist solely of meth-fuelled car cashes caught on surveillance camera, the grainy veracity of which Trash Humpers recreates. If I admit that the latter is a personal favorite of mine, I say so without attempting to justify my viewing on any terms other than voyeurism. The show offers the exploits (and exploitation of) the American underclass as entertainment. This is something I understand much better now after seeing Korine’s film. He gives the phenomenon a context larger than my own prurient interest. So I have to say “Thanks, Harmony!” – you have, paradoxically, made my world a little bit bigger and more humane.  What better goal is there for cinema?

About the Author: Rosemary Heather is a freelance writer and curator.

Rose Hobart, Joseph Cornell

“One need not look for new, as yet unseen images, but one must work with existing ones in such a way that they become new,” Harun Farocki.

To accompany the article on artist filmmaker Duncan Campbell’s use of archives for his acclaimed films Bernadette (2009) and Falls Burns Malone Fiddles (2003) here are seven works representing different facets of found footage work, from pop art collages to political essays to promo music videos and subversive documentaries, these films explore the aesthetics, politics and ethics of appropriation in our mediated society.

1. Rose Hobart, Joseph Cornell (1936)

Prompting accusation of theft from Dali’s unconscious, this classic film from reclusive America surrealist Joseph Cornell is a non-linear tribute to his favorite actress, made by re-editing her exotic feature East of Borneo (1931) and giving birth to the concept of ‘found footage.’

2. America Is Waiting, Bruce Connor (1982)

Filmmaker and artist Bruce Connor, pioneered the use of found footage in his early works such as A MOVIE (1958) and Report (1963-67). America Is Waiting is a dense collage of industrial and military footage made to accompany the track by Brian Eno and David Bryne from their record Life in the Bush of Ghosts. The film and the music both paved the way for the development of audio and visual sampling and the emergence of the music video.

3. WR: Mysteries of the organism, Dusan Makavejev (1971)

Taking the aesthetics of soviet montage, Yugoslav provocateur Dusan Makavejev added the missing element of satire to create ‘Eisenstein with jokes’. Banned in his home country, WR is a international exploration of the relationship of radical politics and sex, exploring the controversial theories of sexologist Wilhelm Reich, rejected by Europe and imprisoned in USA. The film is available on DVD from the Criterion Collection.

4. Images of the World and the Inscription of War, Harun Farocki (1988)

German essay filmmaker Harun Farocki‘s most acclaimed film, Images explores the industrial processes behind the construction of images and what is seen and what isn’t when we look at images. Farocki reveals the gap between seeing and understanding, revealing how all images are ‘found’ and only reveal what they were produced to show.

5. Sonic Outlaws, Craig Baldwin (1995)

San Francisco based filmmaker Craig Baldwin has been making anarchic found footage films since the mid-70s. Sonic Outlaws explore emergent issues around intellectual property and freedom of expression through an investigation of experimental music group Negativland’s legal battle with U2, when they were hypocritically sued by the ‘liberal’ Irish rockers for this subversive EP ‘U-2′ and the use of unauthorised sampling. Full version available on DVD from The Other Cinema.

6. Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, Johan Grimonprez (1997)

A brilliant and prophetic exploration of the relationship of media, terrorism and the aeroplane industry, a brilliant visual essay from Belgian artist Johan Grimonprez. Full version available on DVD from The Other Cinema.

7. It Felt Like a Kiss, Adam Curtis (2009)

Watch It Felt Like a Kiss on the BBC website.

BBCs resident subversive, Curtis has built a substantial reputation for his powerful political documentaries constructed out of material from the BBC archives, such as The Trap (2007) and The Power of Nightmares (2004). His latest film, It Felt Like a Kiss, is produced in collaboration with theatre company Punchdrunk and presented online, embracing new forms of broadcast and experience.