December 1–14, 2022
e-flux Video & Film is very pleased to present Scene Takeover, the sixth and final chapter of the online program Takeover curated by Julian Ross.
Scene Takeover considers how film and television genres can take over our thoughts and even subliminally dictate how we act in the real world. But it also explores how we can act against expectations, become parasites, and inhabit worlds not necessarily designed for us.
Featuring Isabelle Tollenaere’s The Remembered Film (2018); Ghita Skali’s The Invaders (2021); Shireen Seno’s Shotgun Tuding (2014); and Pilvi Takala’s The Stroker (2018).
Watch the films here.
Takeover
VI. Scene Takeover
Thursday, December 1–Wednesday, December 14, 2022
Isabelle Tollenaere, The Remembered Film
2018, 17 minutes
In The Remembered Film, young soldiers from previous wars are seen aimlessly roaming the woods. They wear the uniforms of Soviet troops, of the Wehrmacht, or of American military forces during the Vietnam war. In interviews, they share war memories that they can’t possibly have experienced themselves, but that have nonetheless taken root in their memory. A friction between imagination and reality arises: that which the boys testify to albeit have not experienced, but that yet has genuinely imprinted their minds, amidst other real-life memories. Thus unfolds the intrinsic relationship between storytelling, memory, and history; how forming memories is subject to fictionalization, just as history is a process of creative storytelling, a subjective construction.
Ghita Skali, The Invaders
2021, 10 minutes
The Invaders is a well-known US TV show from the 1970s, in which aliens invade Earth. In the 1990s, the French humorists Les Inconnus made a remake of this TV show, where the invaders are migrants living in France. Transforming the aliens into migrants was a cynical gesture that also showed the absurdity of the extreme right discourses of the time. This video is a remake of this remake, where the world has gone upside down and the attraction from the Global South to Europe has also been reversed.
Shireen Seno, Shotgun Tuding
2014, 13 minutes
In this Pancit Western set in the late 1940s, Tuding journeys to a distant town to hunt down the man who got her youngest sister Teresit pregnant. She’s not going home without him.
Pilvi Takala, The Stroker
2018, 15 minutes
The Stroker is a two-channel video installation based on Takala’s two-week-long intervention at Second Home, a trendy East London coworking space for young entrepreneurs and startups. During the intervention Takala posed as a wellness consultant named Nina Nieminen, the founder of cutting-edge company Personnel Touch who were allegedly employed by Second Home to provide touching services in the workplace. Nina strolled around Second Home being friendly to everyone, greeting and lightly touching people as she passed them by. It gets the office talking; workers gossip amongst themselves, visibly bonding over a common confusion; she is nicknamed ”The Stroker.” The responses of the “touchees” varied widely, most were polite, but there were those whose body language registered a visible discomfort. The nuances of movement demonstrate how people negotiate the dilemma of being mediated bodies under social pressure, and how such responses are controlled by the tacit conventions governing what is deemed to be acceptable behavior. In the clear-walled, open-thinking space of The Stroker, we witness a physical negotiation of boundaries where there seemingly are none.
About the program
Takeover explores the experience of letting another being—their voice, or their mind—into our own. Would we become them, or would they become us? The act of letting someone in, or of being the recipient of a possession, can involve a loss of self. But it can also be a trigger for learning, sharing, or becoming. Watching a film can operate in a similar way. In Sherlock Jr. (1924), Buster Keaton leaps into the cinema screen and enters the onscreen world. Or is it that the onscreen world has entered him? After all, we are in Keaton’s dream, which he has after falling asleep while operating the cinema’s film projector. Film can engulf us and haunt us. In questioning the limitation of understanding film experience as simply reception, Francesco Casetti suggests: “A spectator does not find herself “receiving” a film: she finds herself ‘living’ it.” (2011) Even after the screening is over and we leave the cinema, the film continues to live within us. As film viewers, we are not just a screen but also a projector, taking the film with us into the world.
Curated by Julian Ross, Takeover will unfold in six chapters, each streaming for two weeks on e-flux Video & Film between September 22 and December 15, 2022.
Takeover wraps on Thursday, December 15 with a repeat of all films featured in the six chapters of the program, streaming through Friday, Decmber 16, 11:59pm ET.
With films and videos by Ephraim Asili, Kurdwin Ayub, Maïder Fortuné and Annie MacDonell, Simon Fujiwara, Dora García, Gary Hill, Su-Chen Hung, Hsu Che-yu, Mako Idemitsu, Myriam Jacob-Allard, Jesse McLean, Jonna Kina, Meiro Koizumi, Natsuka Kusano, Toshio Matsumoto, The Nest Collective, Agnieszka Polska, Riar Rizaldi, Manuel Saiz, Shireen Seno, Tiffany Sia, Ghita Skali, Lisa Spilliaert, Sriwhana Spong, Pilvi Takala, Isabelle Tollenaere, Joseph Wilson.
For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.
