Time Theft Agent E2262 // Selected at BCNProduccio/10 La Capella Barcelona
"To haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time. That is what we would be calling here a hauntology. Ontology opposes it only in a movement of exorcism. Ontology is a conjuration" Jacques Derrida,Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning & the New International, pg.202
Time Theft was a expanded piece presented as an installation, a publication, an unfinished novel, a silent film, a soundtrack on a tape and a live performance that activated its parts on to a moment that was supposed to be a reminder of the cultural events on anarchist/communist as they re-possessed catholic churches during the revolts around the civil war in Barcelona.
The aim of the expanded work was to expose the various ways and media used for the construction of narratives to produce a kind of "History" for the means of manipulation and mass control as in J.Goebbels and Nazi Germany.
Roland Barthes's definition of the Third Meaning is intended to be a sensorial key.
The Film is composed on its entirety by film stills and the idea of structuring by a series of lists and visual dialectics borrowed from the Surrealist(as in recounted by Walter Benjamin)is used as basic guidelines for montage .
The Film is composed on its entirety by film stills and the idea of structuring by a series of lists and visual dialectics borrowed from the Surrealist(as in recounted by Walter Benjamin)is used as basic guidelines for montage .
The artist if is considered one, as historian. The subject as double agent, and the work of art as production of counter historicist narratives. Specific to the lack of memory and the hidden truths of the horrors by fascist Francoist in Spain from the civil war onwards.
The archive inside a film that accumulates a ghostly past and re-places /re-makes constantly its own present time as in a call for spirits on a seance session.
The archive inside a film that accumulates a ghostly past and re-places /re-makes constantly its own present time as in a call for spirits on a seance session.
The artist (if considered this to be) as anti-artist, as an spy or as the eye from The Man with a Movie Camera, by Dziga Vertov.
The artist (the subject that replaces it) as a self erased and disappeared author, as narrator of its own research, detective journal.
The installation made around a film screening and the display of elements inside the space as a political stage to question how the politics of the theatrical and of the distribution of elements on a space can let us know what is still not said.
In this case using the ex-Church's architecture of La Capella as it was used for real by Anarchist/Communist during the Civil War, thus generating the feeling of an historical reenactment exercise in order of recovering memory lost.
The film reveals Barcelona's dark heart and a memory of its Civil War that is still to be revealed.
Ruins and mixing far past and immediate past reflecting on how History repeats itself and -re-appears, mediated via detritus left in photographic matter.
Containing images taken by the researcher artist medium, during a series of drifting derives around the Raval's area. Plus many more taken from youtube film, found on the net abyss.
Delivered like a stream of consciousness by the film in it self, the film becoming a living entity, a neutral apparatus containing all sort of images, detritus, ruins and ghost.
Ruins and mixing far past and immediate past reflecting on how History repeats itself and -re-appears, mediated via detritus left in photographic matter.
Containing images taken by the researcher artist medium, during a series of drifting derives around the Raval's area. Plus many more taken from youtube film, found on the net abyss.
Delivered like a stream of consciousness by the film in it self, the film becoming a living entity, a neutral apparatus containing all sort of images, detritus, ruins and ghost.
Civil War, District 5, Film, Death, Dance Apache, L'Age D'or, CNT, Addiction, Dirt, Revolution, Spies, Aliens, Danger, La Criolla, Anarchist, Sci-fi, Tortured bodies, Industry, Ghost, Barcelona bombed, Dead people, the MACBA, Bombs, Cocaine, Bullets on the walls ...........
Time Theft Agent E2162 from esther planas on Vimeo.
I consider the film Time Theft, the starting point of a phase in my practice that orientates its self towards the Essay Film 1)
1)I am adding here the text about such complex definition by London curator and writer Kieron Corless(London, August 2013)
Introduction
The slippery term ‘essay film’ was first coined by the filmmaker Hans Richter in the 1940s, but it wasn’t until 1958 that one essay film in particular, Chris Marker’s Letter to Siberia (not available for this season), was designated and theorised as such by the French critic André Bazin. As the form developed and exploded through the political ferment of the 1960s and onwards, in the hands of such major figures as Marker himself, Jean-Luc Godard, Harun Farocki, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Agnès Varda, Fernando Solanas, Patricio Guzmán, Chantal Akerman and Straub-Huillet to name but a few, the question of what constituted an essay film became more pressing.
At first glance, it could be mistaken for a species of documentary; a personal cinema of ideas that foregrounds the director’s subjectivity through first-person narration, pursuing a certain argument or set of associations. That’s a workable definition, but to what extent is that speaking ‘I’ a performance, and therefore a distancing, fictionalising device not to be taken at face value? And how to account for those films that eschew voiceover, but still manage to convey a distinctively personal take on the world, such as Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera?
Nowadays most commentators agree that the essay film is neither documentary nor fiction but sits somewhere on its own, evincing characteristics of both through its staging of an encounter between a self, filmed images and the world. Could we label it a genre? Probably not, since an essay film often seeks to unfix or disrupt categories, and is actively inimical to them. Think too of the sheer variety of this notoriously hybrid form – notebooks, sketches, diaries, letters, found footage, all grist to its mill.
No wonder elusiveness and instability seem part of its DNA, as the essay film twists into tantalising new shapes, invents itself in the process of its own becoming, wrestles with the apprehension of its inevitable limitations. In other words – cinema at its most risk-taking, engaged and liberated, operating right on the medium’s nerve ends; probing, questioning, subverting, laying bare its own thought-processes. Hardly surprising, as this season attests, that so many of the world’s greatest directors have been unable to resist its lure.
No comments:
Post a Comment