Film Lounge

Programme 2 07 May - 24 June 2012
Film Lounge TERRA 
Curated by Careof DOCVA, Milan

From their archive of 5,000 works, Careof DOCVA, Milan has selected artists who explore the environmental legacy of Italy's 'economic miracle' upon the transformed Italian landscape of the 1980s and '90s.

Solaris, Gabriele Pesci, (2005) 20.45 minutes
One day laughing in this surreal earth, Stefano Pasquini,(2008), 26.42 minutes
Green Gold, Lorenzo Casali, Micol Roubini (2011), 13.38 minutes
Continuum, Annalisa Sonzogni (2008), 4.15 minutes
in campagna,Alessandra Spranzi (2004), 1 minute
To the last breath, Sabrina Muzi (2009), 3 minutes
Planiziaria, Dacia Manto, (2011) 3.23 minutes
Caterpillars into Space, Marco Chiodi, (2011) 3.23 minutes

Programme 3 25 July - 22 July
Programme of contemporary video works from Turin's well established annual programme TORINOver and will explore the hybridity of Turin's artistic networks as part of culturally borderless Europe.

Also showing in the library downstairs are documentary films in Itlaian language about the works of Luigi Ghirri (1943 - 1992) Deserto Rosa and Gabriele Basilico (b. 1994) Fotografo.

Image: Sabrina Muzi - To The Last Breath

Three screening programmes of Italian artist's video works from 1970 to today will include early works by Franco Vaccari and Luigi Viola curated by artist Valentina Bonizzi; a selection of Italian artists' video from the 1980s and '90s from the collection of Careof DOCVA, Milan and a programme of contemporary video works from Turin's well established annual programme TORINOver.

Monday 09 April - Sunday 06 May 2012

Programme 1: 1970 to 1980

This first programme of video works was made in the earliest years of experimentation with the new video technologies by artists in Italy.

Franco Vaccari

Franco Vaccari (b. Modena, 1936). In 1979 Vaccari published ‘Photography and the Technological Unconscious’ detaching from the control of the technical image and observing where the invisibile space of the photographic process creates meaning. The environment becomes the relation as Vaccari’s defines the work of art as a process trigerred instead of an element projected by the artist.

I Canti Lenti (1971) 9 minutes
La Citta Vista a Livello Di Cane (1968) 1 minute

Luigi Viola

Taking Place (1976)  2 minutes
Courtesy Videotapes del Cavallino

Identity as Identification (1976) 2 minutes
Courtesy Videotapes del Cavallino

Diario Publico e Segretto (1975) 2 minutes
Courtesy the artist

Cancellazione (1975) 9 minutes
Courtesy the artist

Frammenti di uno spazio interiore (1980) 18 minutes
Paolo Fassetta e Luigi Viola
Courtesy the artists

Also showing in the downstairs library are documentary films in Italian language about the works of Luigi Ghirri (1943-1992), Deserto Rosa and Gabriele Basilico's (b.1944) Fotografo.

Programme two will be a selection of Italian artists' videos from the 1980s and 90s from the collection of Careof DOCVA, Milan, followed by a third programme of contemporary video works from Turin's well established annual programme TORINOver.

Image: Franco Vaccari, I Cani Lenti, 1971

Slide show: 

The second instalment of Stills’ Social Documents programme presents the work of artists who have used documentary modes to examine the social realities produced by globalisation. While Allan Sekula’s exhibition Ship of Fools deals with the issues surrounding an explicitly male working environment, Ursula Biemann’s video essay Performing the Border focuses on the labour conditions experienced by working-class Mexican women. Both emphasise the materiality of globalisation’s economic processes foregrounding the impact on workers’ bodies together with capital’s demand for mobility. As the geographer and social theorist David Harvey suggests, ‘Capitalism never solves its crisis problems, it simply moves them around.’

Ursula Biemann will exhibit a new work as part of the next chapter of the Social Documents programme. Curated by Angela Dimitrakaki and Kirsten Lloyd the group exhibition ECONOMY will be presented across two venues, Stills and the Centre for Contemporary Art in Glasgow, between January and March 2013.

Angela Dimitrakaki’s essay ‘Materialist Feminism for the Twenty-first Century: The Video Essays of Ursula Biemann’ is available in the Film Lounge reading space alongside two of Biemann’s own publications: Stuff It – The Video Essay in the Digital Age’ and B-Zone: Becoming Europe and Beyond.

Ursula Biemann, Performing the Border (1999), 45 minutes

Performing the Border is a video essay set in the Mexican-US border town Ciudad Juarez, where the U.S. industries assemble their electronic and digital equipment, located right across from El Paso, Texas. Performing the Border looks at the border as both a discursive and a material space constituted through the performance and management of gender relations. The video discusses the sexualisation of the border region through labour division, prostitution, the expression of female desires in the entertainment industry, and sexual violence in the public sphere. Interviews, scripted voice over, quoted text on the screen, scenes and sounds recorded on site, as well as found footage are combined to give an insight into the gendered conditions inscribed in the border region.

La Frontera is a place of unstable identities as a result of migration to a geography characterised by a hostile desert and a border they cannot transgress. The border is discussed as a discursive construction that is articulated through the crossing of people and the power relation of the two nations. There is the story of Concha who learned how to avoid the border control and cross people, mainly pregnant women, to the other side, where they give birth in a US hospital.

Adolescent girls come from central Mexico to the border to start a life from scratch. The video addresses the choices they have, the dangers, the fragility of their new situation caught in an ambivalent world between high technology and the lack of the most rudimentary necessities.

The feminisation of international labour division makes evident that gender matters to capital. The Maquila-section in the video includes fragments of interviews conducted with human rights activist Judith, labor activist Cipriana and journalist Isabel on the condition of the women who are the producers in the global plan and on the relations between the production of technology and gender.

Sex work is a major trade in this border town. Juana, a former prostitute from Torreon, gives us her perspective on the trade and the changes it underwent during the past 10 years. There are crossovers with the Maquila women who need to complement their income on weekends with prostitution. On the other hand, the reversal of income pattern is obvious in the night clubs, where the entertainment is catering mainly to young women with male shows. Relationship patterns are being remapped quite drastically on the border.

In the 90s, the rapid modernisation laid the ground for another urban phenomena: Serial Killings. Since 1993, close to 150 girls and young women have been raped and killed in Juarez according to the same pattern. It’s the biggest case of serial killing known in the world. The video brings the compulsive, repetitive character of the crimes in relation with the mass technologies (registration, identification and simulation) and looks at the entanglement between intimacy and technology in the setting. The border is presented as a metaphor for marginalisation and the artificial maintenance of subjective boundaries at a moment when the distinctions between body and machine, between reproduction and production, between female and male have become more fluid than ever.

Ursula Biemann
www.geobodies.org

Richard William’s powerful photographs and Film Lounge programme tap into his life-long obsession with the SS United States.

Now disintegrating in Philidelphia’s harbour, this once glamorous vessel was once the fastest ocean liner to cross the Atlantic.

Image still from Rollerblading on the Promenade Deck (2008) 2.48 mins Courtesy of artist Phil Buehler

First broadcast on CBS, American Television, 1967

Selected by Stephen Sutcliffe

Film Lounge is delighted to present the 'Ages of Man' a rarely seen film, produced for American television, featuring the great British actor, Sir John Gielgud.

Gielgud, performs alone, on a bare stage reciting a selection of Shakespearean soliloquies and sonnets, based on the anthology edited by George Rylands in 1939, exploring the journey of life from birth to death.

Gielgud first performed 'Ages of Man' in August 1957 at the Freemason's Hall, Edinburgh to a sold out audience during the Festival. The performance was a great success and he toured the work all over the world for the next ten years, winning a Tony Award in 1959 for 'contribution to theatre for his extraordinary insight into the writings of Shakespeare' and an Emmy award for an 'outstanding dramatic program'

Courtesy of Archive of American Television and E1 Entertainment.

Slide show: 

Sweaty suits, privates on parade and merry highlanders…

Square Dance, a film programme and a one-off public dance performance curated by Stills' Film Lounge for Edinburgh's Live Site, BBC Big Screen, Festival Square, as part of the London 2012 Open Weekend programme.

Film Lounge presents its first off-site programme screening programme of three short films, made between 1897 and 2001; depicting groups of men in acts of formal and informal dance.

The final screening of the films will be accompanied by a one-off public dance performance, choreographed by Alan Greig, specifically for Festival Square, inspired by the three films.

Film Programme

Tattoo Miranda Pennell 9 minutes (2001)
Dewar's Scotch Whisky Unaccredited National Library of Scotland 30 seconds (1897)
Sweatlodge Mike Stubbs 7 minutes (1991)

Screening and performance times, BBC Big Screen, Live Site, Festival Square, Edinburgh
Saturday 23 July 1pm - 2.30pm
Sunday 24 July 2pm - 3.15pm
Sunday 24 July, 3pm, performance (15 minutes)
Choreographed by Alan Greig

Further information available here.

Live Sites are big screens and event spaces in urban centres offering live information, video, news and community events

Open Weekend is a UK wide programme of over 1,000 unique sporting and cultural initiatives with thousands of people across the UK taking part in unique events and creative projects to celebrate the ‘One Year to Go’ countdown for the London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games 2012. It forms part of Creative Scotland’s programme to celebrate London Olympic and Paralympic Games 2012 and Three Years to Go until Glasgow 2014

Slide show: 

In collaboration with the Edinburgh International Film Festival, Stills' Film Lounge presents an exciting new programme of films.

Extending the EIFF's programme of experimental shorts, Stills curates a special showcase of films from the Austrian distributor sixpackfilm. These four short films combine formal rigour, surreal humour and social critique - from a sophisticated homage Eadweard Muybridge to a fascinating study of the minature world of mice.

Film Programme

Curated by Debi Banerjee and Kim Knowles

Slide show: 

Stills' Film Lounge is delighted to present two rarely screened film works from Kazakhstan to accompany Ruth Maclennan's exhibition Anarcadia. The dry, barren landscape of the deserts of Kazakhstan provides the backdrop to both these films made almost 60 years apart, which span the country's history from the height of Stalinism to the brink of Perestroika and consequential independence.

Bringing oil across the desert to the land of the Soviets (1930) is a propaganda film, from an unknown film-maker, which extols the importance of the railway in the forging of the Soviet states and the wealth of its land.

Film Lounge also presents the first ever UK screening of Darezhan Omirbaev's July/Schilde (1988), a narrative short, which depicts the antics of two adolescent boys, on a single day in the steppes of a Kazakh village. Darezhan Omirbaev was recognised as a genuine auteur following the international success of this film and consequently emerged as one of the most celebrated directors from the Kazakh New Wave.

FILM LOUNGE PROGRAMME

FILM LOUNGE EVENT

 
Image July/Schilde Darezhan Omirbaev (1988)
 

Slide show: 

The ethically hazardous terrains of nationalism, migration and borders are explored in Stills' latest Film Lounge programme. Approaching documentary as a potentially loaded, subjective and theatrical practice these artists use animation and home video cameras to examine politically charged situations in Estonia, Sudan, Israel and the Czech Republic.

Featuring four film works by Estonian visual artist and documentary film-maker, Kristina Norman, Israeli artist, Shlomi Yaffe, Swedish animated documentary film-makers, David Aronowitsch and Hanna Heilborn and Avi Mograbi, one of Israel's most celebrated non-fiction film-makers.

FILM LOUNGE PROGRAMME

Curated by Nea Ehrlich and Harry Weeks Ph.d Students from The University of Edinburgh’s History of Art Department, specialising in Contemporary Art

Image Z32 Avi Mograbi (courtesy of the artist)

Slide show: 

The romantic impulse in ethnographic films is examined in the new Film Lounge programme. Moving image has long been used as part of the scientific description of individual peoples and cultures, recording rituals and relationships together with the spaces and practices of everyday life.

These historical films move from Agnès Varda's celebration of Socialist ideals in 1960s Cuba in which she captures the optimism of local communities four years after the revolution to an early tourist's-eye-view of the remote island of St Kilda. The problematics of the ethnographic approach to documentation are made more explicit in Luis Ospina and Carlos Mayolo's The Vampires of Poverty, a film which directly challenges the practices of what they call 'porno-miseria' or 'poverty porn'. Whether embracing or critiquing a romantic perspective, each of these films reveal the extent to which it is embedded in documentary modes.

FILM LOUNGE PROGRAMME