Upcoming lecture and films
June 21–23, 2022
Join us next week at e-flux Screening Room for Towards Non-Anthropocentric Moving Images, a lecture by Jonathan Walley, and for After the End of Utopia, a screening of films by Dane Komljen; and at Bar Laika for a screening of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s The Bridegroom, the Actress, and the Pimp.
Towards Non-Anthropocentric Moving Images: Exemplars of a Counter-History
A lecture by Jonathan Walley
Tuesday, June 21, 7pm
e-flux Screening Room
172 Classon Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11205
For the film machine to become an artistic medium, it had to be absolved of its automaticity. To complicate matters, its automaticity was three-fold: It was an industrial machine, optical device, and photochemical process. For cinema to become an art form, its automaticity had to be shunted to the background, the machine re-cast as creative tool, its operations determined by individual human will rather than nonhuman natural and mechanical forces. To accomplish this, film artists and critics refashioned the film machine into an extension of the human body, and, moreover, one that could be used creatively and generatively, not a mere prosthesis but an instrument of creative action and thought. In short, it was a matter of anthropomorphizing the moving image.
What might the opposite of this look like? How might moving-image artists, in utilizing their technological mediums, see those mediums not as extensions, but, instead, make concessions of their humanity—their artistry, sensibility, consciousness—to the machine? Join us for the second lecture in the monthly lecture series Film Beyond Film at e-flux Screening Room, by researchers whose work has formed the discourse at the intersection of modern and contemporary art and cinema, and that focuses on the histories of artists’ films, situating them within broader aesthetic, political, and economic contexts.
The lecture will also be livestreamed here.
Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet: The Bridegroom, the Actress, and the Pimp
Wednesday, June 22, 9pm
Bar Laika by e-flux
224 Greene Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11238
Bar Laika is very pleased to present Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s The Bridegroom, the Actress, and the Pimp (1968, 23 minutes) as part of its weekly film screenings.
Love is a tawdry transaction, and a coercive weapon of the ruling class in this exhilarating, controversial product of the Munich Action-Theater—an immediate forerunner to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Anti-Theater productions of the late 1960s. Invoking the writings of Chairman Mao and the events of Paris 1968, Straub and Huillet cast Irm Hermann, Hanna Schygulla, and Peer Raben (who would soon become regulars of the Fassbinder acting ensemble) along with Fassbinder himself in this radical condensation of Ferdinand Bruckner’s 1926 play Pains of Youth, a single 11-minute shot that is subsumed within an intricately structured, 12-shot constellation of other quotations, including poetry by Saint John of the Cross and musical passages from Bach’s Ascension Oratorio. New Digital Restoration.
After the End of Utopia: A Screening of Films by Dane Komljen
Thursday, June 23, 7pm
e-flux Screening Room
172 Classon Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11205
“I don’t make films about things that I know. When there is something I can’t see, I make a film in order to see it.” —Dane Komljen
Join us at e-flux Screening Room for the screening of Dane Komljen’s All Still Orbit (2016) and All the Cities of the North (2016), introduced by the artist via video call. This screening features two works by the Serbian filmmaker that hover between fantasy and recollection, creating a cinematic space situated between utopian dreams and post-utopian reality.
All Still Orbit (2016, 23 minutes)
All Still Orbit links together two apparently unrelated moments in the construction of Brasilia: a dream by an Italian saint used to justify its creation and a small city built by workers constructing a new capital to house them and their families. How do you make sense of a city built on a dream? Are all dreams made equal? Sometimes a documentary can feel like a fairy tale.
All the Cities of the North (2016, 97 minutes)
In the darkly wooded grounds and concrete blocks of what was once a resort complex, two men share an enigmatic, tender non-binary life. They doze together, scavenge the grounds and urinate outdoors before the third man shows up. In this richly suggestive and moving elegy to lost utopias, no words are exchanged and speech only comes in monologues, taking up questions on the architecture and administration of human sociality. One recurring thread in All the Cities of the North concerns how people use and recycle buildings, engineer the landscapes, and appropriate spaces in ways for which they were not intended. The flurries of narration allude to socialistic objectives in architecture, whether in a Yugoslav company’s construction work for the International Trade Fair in Lagos, Nigeria, or the plans for the twentieth-century city of Brasília.
Stay tuned to upcoming programs on our website, or subscribe to our Screening Room events mailing list here. For more information contact program@e-flux.com.
