June 5–September 5, 2021
Participants: Jia Zhangke, Nanouk Leopold & Daan Emmen, Lucrecia Martel, Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese and Carlos Reygadas
Eye invited five leading filmmakers from five continents to participate in the jubilee exhibition Vive le cinéma!, marking 50 years of the International Film Festival Rotterdam and 75 years of Eye Filmmuseum. The directors were asked to create a work that exploits the potential of the three-dimensional exhibition space instead of the two-dimensional cinema screen. Each of them made a cinematographic installation that explores the boundaries of their work and the art of film in general. In this way, Eye and IFFR celebrate the unlimited power and diversity of world cinema, which is such a vital part of their programming.
Jia Zhangke, born in 1970 in Fenyang, China, represents the voice of Chinese independent cinema. Films such as Platform (2000) and Still Life (2006) are located at the intersection of fiction and documentary, while social observation plays a key role. His most important stylistic device is the extended wide shot. The individual forms part of a larger entity, space, situation or era. For Vive le cinéma! the director created the installation Close-Up, based on the ubiquity of surveillance cameras.
Nanouk Leopold and Daan Emmen, both born in 1968 in Rotterdam, have been making spatial work together since 2009 under the name Leopold Emmen. Leopold’s films, among them It’s all so Quiet (2013) and Cobain (2018), have been screened at the film festivals in Berlin, Cannes and Toronto, and are celebrated for their consistent artistic character and restrained expression, and the way space and location determine the story. In Filmwork for Eye: 5 Scenes at a Walking Pace, Leopold Emmen presents the most pared-down form of cinema, using light and sound to create a physical and spatial experience of film.
Lucrecia Martel (born in Salta, Argentina, in 1966) rose to prominence as a filmmaker with her debut film The Swamp (2001), and more recently with the hallucinatory Zama (2017). Time and space in her work are elastic and infinite, and the sound design often determines the final form of the film. In The Passage, her new installation at Eye, she works with heat images and voices from northern Argentina (qom, quechua, aymara, wichi and guarani), yet another attempt in unmasking the artificiality of race.
Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese, born in 1980 in Hlotse, Lesotho, is one of the most exciting voices in cinema today. He belongs to a generation of makers from Africa whose work questions the stereotypes surrounding the continent’s cinema and develops new visual imagery for their stories. His film This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection (2019) uses wonderful and gripping images to tell the story of his grandmother, who was forced to leave her land. At Eye he is presenting a stunning multi-screen installation that explores the representation of black female bodies: Bodies of Negroes. I Will Sculpture God, Grim and Benevolent.
Carlos Reygadas, born in 1971 in Mexico City, makes films that are intuitive tales of breathtaking beauty about human relations and the mystery of life. Inspired by the mystical visual imagery of Carl Theodor Dreyer and Andrei Tarkovsky, he observes the limits of human existence. Spirituality, sexuality, violence and nature are recurring themes in his sometimes provocative, sometimes controversial films, such as Japón (2002), Stellet Licht (2007) and Our Times (2018). Inspired by a gigantic film reel or a pre-cinema device, his carousel-like installation The Eye Machine confronts its visitors with their own gaze and that of the other.
Video essays and online platform
In collaboration with the IFFR programme Critics’ Choice VII On Positionality, five new video essays were made to contextualize the works on display in Vive le cinéma! These are available on the Vive le cinéma! online platform, which also includes a digital space containing background information, clips, documents and texts related to each director.
Film programme
The Vive le cinéma! jubilee programme embraces film as the seventh art and features films by the five filmmakers who made works for the exhibition. Five special film evenings about the directors will be held during the programme.
For screening dates and times, visit here.
