Another Gaze Journal 03

A visual anthology compiling the contributions of the filmmakers who are part of the Light Cone collection, a key institution for the distribution, promotion and preservation of experimental cinema in France and around the world, on the occasion of its 40th anniversary.

2022 marks an important moment for Light Cone: its 40th anniversary. Such an event should be celebrated in the best possible way. Light Cone has come together thanks to the filmmakers whose films entered the collection over the years. We've decided to invite them to participate in an editorial project, a book in which we would publish their contributions: letters, postcards, photographs, drawings, film stills, collages, etc., which they have sent us for the occasion of the anniversary. A collective scrapbook in which the materiality of the objects—paper, photos, colors, handwritten notes—evokes that of analog cinema, which we have always defended. A book of images is born, and through the creation of this micro-collection, so is a portable museum of about one hundred pieces, which are ready to be exhibited and which will remain in the care of Light Cone's archive.

With Michel Amarger, Martin Arnold, Caroline Avery, Peter-Conrad Beyer, Giuseppe Boccassini, Patrick Bokanowski, Louise Bourque, Robert Breer, Dietmar Brehm, Claudio Caldini, Stefano Canapa, Abigail Child, Pip Chodorov, Martha Colburn, Philippe Cote, Sandra Davis, Frédérique Devaux, Karel Doing, Anja Dornieden, Flatform, Cécile Fontaine, Olivier Fouchard, Su Friedrich, Siegfried Alexander Fruhauf, Peter Gidal, Milena Gierke, Christoph Girardet, Juan David, Gonzalez Monroy, Christophe Guérin, Nicky Hamlyn, Barbara Hammer, Teo Hernandez, Tony Hill, Mike Hoolboom, Jakobois, Larry Jordan, Patrice Kirchhofer, Maria Kourkouta, Alexandre Larose, Christian Lebrat, Emmanuel Lefrant, Maurice Lemaître, Jeanne Liotta, Rose Lowder, Johann Lurf, Pablo Marín, Mara Mattuschka, Bruce Mcclure, Miles Mckane, Luc Meichler, Barbara Meter, Peter Miller, Matthias Müller, Michel Nedjar, Dominique Noguez, Vivian Ostrovsky, Simon Payne, Emmanuel Piton, Charlotte Pryce, Gisèle Rapp-Meichler, Abraham Ravett, Emily Richardson, D.N. Rodowick, Gaëlle Rouard, Martine Rousset, Pierre Rovere, Ben Russell, Daïchi Saïto, Maki Satake, Sylvia Schedelbauer, Jeff Scher, Stanley Schtinter, Guy Sherwin, José Antonio Sistiaga, John Smith, Vicky Smith, Michael Snow, Malena Szlam, Mika Taanila, Marcelle Thirache, Trinh T. Minh-ha, David Wharry, Telemach Wiesinger, Antoinette Zwirchmayr.

In 2013, the filmmaker Chantal Akerman's mother was dying. She flew back from New York to Brussels to care for her, and between dressing her, feeding her and putting her to bed, she wrote. She wrote about her childhood, the escape her mother made from Auschwitz but didn't talk about, the difficulty of loving her girlfriend, C., her fear of what she would do when her mother did die. Among these imperfectly perfect fragments of writing about her life, she placed stills from her films. My Mother Laughs is both the distillation of the themes Akerman pursued throughout her creative life, and a version of the simplest and most complicated love story of all: that between a mother and a daughter.

Translated by Daniella Shreir with an introduction by Eileen Myles and afterword by Frances Morgan.

A collection of writings by and interviews with Duras about her filmmaking, first published in French by P.O.L. in 2021 and translated into English by Daniella Shreir.

Working chronologically through her nineteen films, made between 1966 and 1985, this collection of reflections by Marguerite Duras (1914–1996) includes non-standard press releases, notes to her actors, letters to funders, short essays on themes as provocatively capacious as ‘mothers’ and ‘witches’, as well as some of the most significant interviews she gave about her cinematic and writing practices (with filmmakers and critics including Jacques Rivette, Caroline Champetier and Jean Narboni).

In Duras's hands, all of these forms turn into a strange, gnomic literature in which the boundary between word and image becomes increasingly blurred and the paradox of creating a cinema that seeks ‘to destroy the cinema’ finds its most potent expression.

Yet, Duras is never concerned only with her own work, or even with the broader project of making cinema: her preoccupations are global, and the global crucially informs her perceptions of the way in which she works. With the audiovisual as a starting point, her encyclopaedic associative powers bring readers into contact with subjects as diverse as the French Communist Party, hippies, Jews, revolutionary love, madness and freedom, across four decades of an oeuvre that is always in simultaneous dialogue with the contemporary moment and world history.

MARGUERITE DURAS (1914–1996) published over forty novels, numerous essays, novellas and plays and made nineteen films. She was part of the French Resistance, joined then left the Communist Party, and actively protested against the war in Algeria. She collaborated repeatedly with actors including Jeanne Moreau, Delphine Seyrig and Gerard Depardieu. Her films speak of her childhood in Indochina and the French colonies, of desire (burning and frustrated), madness and domesticity. Contemporary filmmakers including Claire Denis, Alice Diop and John Waters have cited Duras’ cinema as inspiration for their own work. 

Se Te Subió El Santo is a collection of self – portraits taken by the artist directly after she awoke every morning while away on a week-long residency in Iowa City, IA at the Center for Afrofuturist Studies in Spring 2016. This daily practice confronts notions of the artist’s interests in rendering a full self implicit of gender, race, sexuality, and spirituality while challenging and collapsing the intersections of each identity as well.

The title of the work is taken from Ana Mendieta, the Iowa Years: A critical study, 1969 through 1977 where Julia Ann Herzberg writes in the dissertation:

Ana and Raquelin Mendieta’s vocabulary contained many Afro-Cuban idiomatic expressions. For example, they would often respond to a friend who was acting in an unruly or hyperactive manner by asking” “Se te subió el santo? (“Are you in a trance?”) In the Afro-Cuban context, the expression “subirse el santo” is used in religious ceremony when the orisha/saint takes possession of the believer.

The monograph also includes an essay by author Akwaeke Emezi.

First edition, 94 page, black and white, leather bound hardcover with white foil embossment 

TIONA NEKKIA MCCLODDEN is an interdisciplinary research-based conceptual artist, filmmaker and curator whose work explores, and critiques issues at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and social commentary. McClodden’s interdisciplinary approach traverses documentary film, experimental video, sculpture, and sound installations. Themes explored in McClodden’s films and works have been re-memory and more recently narrative biomythography.

A reflection about the status of the image as a balance of forces in tension and a paradoxical act of cancellation of the body through its own representation.

In Ion Grigorescu’s work, as in the book, the body is continually shown in different ways - from photography to film, from performance to drawing - and yet it remains absent, obscuring its own identity in an attempt to question the collective one. As it is impossible to show his art during the regime, it ends up hiding, disappearing inside the image. Instead of showing, the image conceals, because it is non-documentary and non-transmittable; it is an act of birth, a prove of the artist’s resistance, especially as a human being inside (or against) any geographical or historical background. In the rituals of his gestures and in the symbolism of his performances, Grigorescu finds a way to stay alive, preserving his own intellectual status while also defending the dignity of everyday life.

The book traces the progression, both expansive and inclusive, of his work, which inscribes itself into the space of the body and of the world. Grigorescu absorbs elements of the surrounding reality, showing us a continuity between art and life: his act of dissidence is not an outcry of provocation, nor is it extreme; it is an anti-aesthetic operation which uses experimentation and rough techniques to uncover the fiction of art, to denounce the artifice of representation and to affirm images as an instrument of subversive power.

Ion Grigorescu (Bucharest, 1945) is one of the most significant Romanian contemporary artists of the Post-War period and an iconic figure of the conceptual and performative art since the early 70s. He represented Romania at Venice Biennial in 1997 and 2011; his works are in the main public collections, such as MoMA, New York; mumok and Erste Foundation, Vienna; Tate Modern and Deutsche Bank AG, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris.

This special, limited-edition issue of Plaster celebrates Akomfrah’s commission for the British Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. The linen presentation box contains: an essay by Akomfrah’s long-time friend and collaborator, the BAFTA-winning film curator June Givanni; an interview with Akomfrah by Harriet Lloyd-Smith; original portraits by photographer Siam Coy and a fold-out poster featuring an exclusive still from Akomfrah’s film installation, Listening All Night To The Rain, now screening in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

With creative direction by Constantine // Spence and design by Emma Ralph.

published commonly, no no no expounds an experimental poetic offering, both text & art.

each issue features a limited edition artwork. which can be tacked or framed or stored in a drawer.

celestial in nature, no no no takes the form required, and necessary.

Ten shots of the sky, each ten minutes long. That’s all it takes to describe James Benning’s film from 2004. And yet, this simplicity conceals a rich and absorbing drama, one of the great works of the American avant-garde. Scholar and critic Erika Balsom unfolds its hidden intricacies of meaning, extending its lessons with crystalline prose, a comparable sense of depths, and an exhilarating, maximalist intimation of what criticism can do and become. She brings you from the film itself into the mind of the artist, through philosophical musings and art historical scholarship. The book is part of a Decadent Editions series of 10 books about 10 films.