My Cinema

The Book of Skies, like its predecessor Excess-The Factory, emerged from poet Leslie Kaplan's experience participating in the national strike and social revolution of ’68 in France. Early in ‘68 Kaplan, like others, left her studies in order to take on factory work, as an aspect of revolutionary practice. Excess—the Factory, puts the factory experience strikingly on the page in sparse and original language. The Book of Skies takes place in the period just after the ‘68 events as the central speaker now observes the places, landscapes, and people surrounding and relying on factory production in French cities, small and large. As the poem’s speaker moves from site to site, she finds possibility within the social spaces of the market, the street, the café, and even the factory itself. While class and gendered violence threaten to shut down hopes for freedom and renewal, the sky, as reality and as figure, functions as an aperture, drawing our attention upward and outward, even or especially when domestic and work-spaces are most violent or suffocating.

From the beginning of her career, French poet, playwright, and novelist Leslie Kaplan has been an important writer of the French left. She has published over twenty books in all three genres, many of which have been translated into German, Swedish, Spanish, Danish, Norwegian, and now, English. Her first book, L'exces l’usine (1982), gained the attention of writers such as Marguerite Duras and Maurice Blanchot, and became an important book for the ‘68 generation. In 2018, Commune Editions published Excess—The Factory, translated by Julie Carr and Jennifer Pap. This was the book’s first translation into English, though it had been translated into five other languages.

The Darkroom contains the script for Marguerite Duras’s 1977 radically experimental film Le camion (The Truck). Between images of a truck in motion, juxtaposed voiceovers, and cutaways to Duras in conversation with Gérard Depardieu, Le camion turns the art of film into a means of enabling the viewer to engage multiple faculties—not only the visual and the aural, but also memory, imagination, and desire.

Also included here is a series of short essays in which Duras makes provocative connections between film and textuality, as well as a fascinating dialogue with Michelle Porte. Together amounting to a crucial contribution to the field of film theory, these texts make brilliantly apparent the depth and integrity of Duras’s aesthetic, philosophical, and political thinking.

Translated by Alta Ifland and Eireene Nealand. Introduction by Jean-Luc Nancy

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.

Written in the course of the year following the publication of Book of Mutter, and inspired by the lectures of Roland Barthes, Anne Carson, and Jorge Luis Borges, Appendix Project collects eleven talks and essays. These surprising and moving performances, underscored by the sleeplessness of the first year of their child’s life, contain their dazzling thinking through the work of On Kawara, Roland Barthes, W.G. Sebald, Bhanu Kapil, Walter Benjamin, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Marguerite Duras, Marlene Dumas, Louise Bourgeois, Doris Salcedo, Jenny Holzer, and more.

Experimental film practice from an international and transdisciplinary perspective.

Karel Doing is an experimental filmmaker and researcher who has worked across the globe with fellow artists and filmmakers, creating a body of work that is difficult to pinpoint with a simple catchphrase. In Ruins and Resilience he weaves autobiographical elements and critical reviews together with his wide ranging interdisciplinary approach, reflecting on his own practice by positioning key works within the context of a vibrant experimental film scene in Europe, North and South America, and Asia. Doing demonstrates how experimental filmmakers have continued to renew their practice despite the almost total demise of analog motion picture film and the constant neglect of this art form by institutions and critics. Written in a fluent and accessible style, the book looks into the connections between the work of groundbreaking artists within the field and subjects such as transgression, improvisation, collectivity, materiality, phenomenology, and perception. Specifically, intersections with music and sound are investigated, appealing to the idea of the cross-modal brain, the ability to perceive sounds and images in an integrated way. Instead of looking again at the "golden era" of experimental film, the book starts in the 1980s, showing how this art form has never ceased to surprise and inspire. The author's hands-on engagement with the medium is formational for his more theoretical approach and writing, making the book a highly original contribution in the field that is informative and inspiring for academic and practitioners alike.

This book on the films of Anton Vidokle features essays and conversations by theorists, curators, and artists exploring the themes of technological immortality and resurrection informed by Cosmist philosophy.

Citizens of the Cosmos examines the artist Anton Vidokle's films and the Cosmist philosophy underpinning them. It features essays and conversations with Vidokle by seminal contemporary theorists, curators, and artists: Franco "Bifo" Berardi, Keti Chukhrov, Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, Daniel Muzyczuk, Miguel Amado and Georgia Perkins, Elizabeth Povinelli, and Raqs Media Collective. This is the first book to survey Vidokle's Cosmism-related filmic output, begun in 2014, and includes full scripts from the films.

The book's contributors speculate on Vidokle's Cosmist conceptions of technological immortality, utopian resurrection, museology, and space travel, grappling with how these ideas embroil or crystallize contemporary theories, practices, and technologies: atmospheric manipulation, cryonics, biopolitics, extraplanetary prospecting, geo-engineering, transhumanism, genetics.

Franco "Bifo" Berardi disagrees with the Cosmist conjecture of death as a flaw in the conception of the human being. Elizabeth Povinelli digests the life-nonlife mattering of dust through relationships to and from the human and more-than-human ancestors to come.

Boris Groys contemplates the gravitational forces between Cosmism and communism according to cosmic and social orders, grounded as they are in the laws of both physics and socialist politics. Keti Chukhrov considers the formation of thinking through madness, dying, and reasoning according to Cosmist philosophical and religious debates and beliefs.

Raqs Media Collective and Anton Vidokle discuss different cultures of death, finitude, and rituals. Miguel Amado and Georgia Perkins examine the in-betweeness of the categories of life and death through the designs of terraforming vehicles navigating interplanetary space travel.

Daniel Muzyczuk investigates Vidokle's interests in the context of the history of the collection at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, while Liam Gillick and Anton Vidokle converse about filmmaking references and methods, from voiceover narrative to editing processes.

Edited by Miguel Amado. Contributions by Franco "Bifo" Berardi, Keti Chukhrov, Raqs Media Collective, Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, Daniel Muzyczuk, Miguel Amado and Georgia Perkins, Elizabeth A. Povinelli.

Exhibition catalogue of filmmaker, visual artist, and writer Pedro Neves Marques's solo project "Vampires in Space" at the Portuguese Pavilion, 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2022.

"In space it's always night." A family of vampires travels through space, carrying life to a faraway planet. Alone, they recall their past, offering an open-ended narrative about the role of fiction in our lives, with a special care for transgender experiences.

This book includes an interview, film scripts and poetry by Neves Marques, curatorial texts by João Mourão, Luís Silva, alongside visual documentation and other contributions by Manuela Moscoso and Filipa Ramos.

The work of Pedro Neves Marques (born 1984 in Lisbon, Portugal) combines anthropological research, cinema, publishing, poetic and fictional writing. Their hybrid aesthetic, that blends science fiction and documentary realism is influenced by the history of feminist and queer sciences, and projects us into futures that question the control of our bodies, our desires and the world around us beyond the register of dystopia. In doing so, they explore how we might transform our imaginaries of gender, new technologies, ecology and postcolonial issues.

This DVD contains:
Light Reading, 1978, 20 min.
Pictures on Pink Paper, 1982, 35 min.
Cold Draft, 1988, 28 min.

Lis Rhodes has been at the forefront of British experimental filmmaking since the early 1970s. She studied at the North East London Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art. A strong formal aesthetic has been developed in her films, reflecting her involvement with the debates and practice which emerged from the London Filmmakers' Co-operative, where she was Cinema Curator 1975-6. Early 'expanded' works such as Light Music (1975) fused performance and multi-screen projection with an exploration of the visual qualities of sound. Her analysis of broader political and social questions can be traced to her later films, which combine formal rigour with a passionate critique of issues from nuclear power to domestic violence. As an active campaigner for women's rights, Rhodes was a founder member of Circles, the first women's artist film and video (1979) and was an Arts Advisor to the Greater London Council between 1982 and 1985. She lives and works in London and teaches at Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London.