Film & Video

Assaf Gruber’s films examine how art affects individuals who are not necessarily drawn to it. What may seem to be the unladen weight of culture, sometimes turns out to be its own rendering.

The films’ plots emerge from their characters’ personal environments, addressing the manner by which personal stories become intertwined with political ideologies, and the way in which social relations between private and public spheres are shaped. Gruber’s protagonists include: a sixty-year-old man, who due to his religious background was rejected multiple times from East German art academies during the 1970s; a retired security guard from the Old Masters Gallery in Dresden who now wants to spend the rest of her life as a volunteer in an Avant-garde museum, and the Chinese owners of a manufacturing company for contemporary sculpture, based in Poland. 

The publication is composed of eight chapters, each focusing on a discussion that turned out to be a significant factor in the films’ production. The tran- scription of each conversation is placed next to film stills with subtitles superimposed. This conceptual design allows Gruber to present the films as the third party in each chapter, as if they too are commenting, questioning, and completing the dialogue. 

Contributors: Paolo Caffoni (Ed.)

This book brings together contributions from participants and guests of Film in the Present Tense – International Symposium on Current Developments in Analog Film Culture, held in Berlin. It reflects a contemporary discussion around the use, value and purpose of analogue film from a multiplicity of perspectives: artists, filmmakers, scholars, archivists, curators, technicians and manufacturers. Film in the Present Tense intends to provide a documentation of the collective momentum that characterized the symposium and it responds to the persistent desire to keep talking about analogue film.

Organized by LaborBerlin in collaboration with Filminstitut Udk Berlin.

Author(s): (ed.) L.Greenfield, D. S. Phillips, K.Schroedinger

Contributors: Nicola Baldini, Erika Balsom, Petra Belc, Christa Blümlinger, Britt Al-Busultan, Anja Dornieden, Juan David Gonzáles Monroy, Guy Edmonds, Scott Fitzpatrick, Tiago Ganhão, Sally Golding, Luisa Greenfield, Philip Hoffman, Emmanuel Lefrant, Olga Moskatova Aurélie Percevault, Deborah S. Phillips, Martin Reinhart, Nicolas Rey, Julian Ross, Katia Rossini, Kerstin Schroedinger, Guy Sherwin, Björn Speidel, Peter Taylor, Esther Urlus, Stefanie Weberhofer, Philip Widmann, Zero Pixel, Ulrich Ziemons

A book from A Nos Amours gathering up all the research and writing that went into making the London Chantal Akerman retrospective possible.

Between 2013 and 2015,  A Nos Amours presented in London a complete retrospective of the films of the celebrated film-maker Chantal Akerman. This was a complex and demanding project as rights and screening copies turned out to be widely scattered and difficult to access. The research needed to present this retrospective is offered in this book so that others may easily follow suit.

Also included are the texts, journalism and blogging that was offered to the audience as a means to engage with film-works that are at once radical, heterodox and, in many cases, little known. The book aims to be accurate and a reliable source of detailed information about the films.

Texts are included that provide invaluable insight, including by:

Raymond Bellour, Richard Brody, Ivone Margulies, Marion Schmid and Ginette Vincendeau.

Laura Mulvey has written an expansive foreword, surveying Akerman's achievement, making use of the book as an aide-mémoire for what stands as one of the astonishing bodies of work in all cinema:

"As a collage of writing of many different kinds, the Handbook crucially bears witness to the effect that Akerman has had on the film community, from her earliest movies until her last... The high quality of the texts included in the book are all a reminder of the way that her ‘cinematic’ qualities have advanced our understanding of film." (Laura Mulvey preface)

First critical edition of Kathy Acker’s unpublished early writings from (1969-1976). Comprises almost all the typescripts from that period present in the Kathy Acker’s archives. Features also the transcription and presentation of Acker’s two 1974 experimental videos.

Editor: Justin Gajoux. Critical notes: Justin Gajoux & Claire Finch. Also with texts of: Alan Sondheim, Emily Cheng, Jill Kroesen, Peter Gordon, Claire Finch, Anna Maria Pinaka, Matias Viegener, Justin Gajoux.

I Want reviews the eponymous duo's double-projection film installation examining issues of gender, sexuality and performativity—and inspired by the words of punk poetess Kathy Acker and convicted whistle-blower Chelsea Manning. This publication documents the major film installation I Want (2015) by collaborative artists Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, which was presented at their 2015 solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Zürich and Nottingham Contemporary.

The double-projection film installation is based on a script that borrows texts from American punk-poet Kathy Acker (1947-1997), as well as chats and materials by convicted whistle-blower Chelsea Manning that speak of her reasons for revealing nearly one million secret military and diplomatic documents through WikiLeaks, at the same time exposing her transgender identity to her superiors.

Through poetic gestures of appropriation and recombination, Boudry and Lorenz examine issues around gender, sexuality, the performance of identity, and the nature of collaboration. Alongside generous color documentation, written contributions by Gregg Bordowitz, Laura Guy, Dean Spade, and Craig Willse unpack and reflect upon both the historical context and contemporary significance of this multivalent work.

Including essays about Barbara Hammer, Agnès Varda, Camille Billops, Jane Arden, Penny Slinger, Ana Mendieta, Hito Steyerl, Mati Diop, Catherine Breillat, Carol Morley, Ulrike Ottinger, Charlotte Prodger, Charlotte Pryce, Rosalind Nashashibi & Lucy Skaer, Gloria Camiruaga, Margarethe von Trotta, Astra Taylor, Lina Wertmüller, and more.

Including essays about Lucrecia Martel, Alice Rohrwacher, Cecilia Mangini, Chantal Akerman, Mika Rottenberg, Anocha Suwichakornpong, Agnès Varda, Barbara Hammer, Laida Lertxundi.

The first issue contains interviews with women including Carolee Schneemann, Mania Akbari, Laura Mulvey, Alice Diop, Bette Gordon, and Lis Rhodes. It contains pieces on the films of women including Kathleen Collins, Sally Potter, Chantal Akerman, Moyra Davey, Camille Henrot, Naomi Kawase, Germaine Dulac, Alice Guy-Blaché.

The book includes Mendieta's first published comprehensive filmography resulting from three years of collaborative research conducted by the Estate of Ana Mendieta and the University of Minnesota as well as original essays by John Perreault, Michael Rush, Rachel Weiss, Lynn Lukkas, Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, and Laura Wertheim Joseph.

The first book-length treatment of Mendieta's moving-image practice, Covered in Time and History aims to locate her films centrally within her larger oeuvre and at the forefront of the multidisciplinary shifts that characterized visual arts practice during the 1970s.

Bringing together both known and previously unseen works of film and video, installations, works on paper, and material from her archive, this volume addresses critical themes that appear throughout Hammer's work, including sensation and intimacy, lesbian representation, and the maintenance of illness, in addition to exploring the artist's relationship to experimental queer cinema, feminist history, and environmental activism. Featuring a wide range of responses, from personal anecdotes to academic analysis and poetic interpretation, this volume highlights the resonating impact of Hammer's artistic narrative across cinema studies, art history, queer theory, and feminist thought.

This delectable book collects the rococo prose of Lisa Robertson. There are essays - many originally published as catalogue texts by art galleries - on the syntax of the suburban home, Vancouver fountains, Value Village, the joy of synthetics, scaffolding and the persistence of the Himalayan blackberry. It makes for one of the most intriguing books you'll ever read.

This book marks the ten-year anniversary of the project A Collective Memory by Azin Feizabadi. The project encompasses five narrative-driven films, alongside other artworks. Each film has its own urgency, approach, and point of departure. The films naturally vary in their subjects, they touch upon stories of migration, uprising, transformation, revolution, renewal, collapse, defeat, depression, and desire that connect the life of the artist with those around him. The research materials that have come up over the course of this project consist, on the one hand, of concrete historical events and, on the other hand, all the innumerable, fragmented personal memories spread between pats, presents, and futures that narrate every-changing stories of how things were, are, and may be.

Contributors: Jens Maier-Rothe & Ashkan Sepahvand (co-editors) Shahab Fotouhi, Nanna Heidenreich, Sarah Rifky, Rasha Salti, Ashkan Sepahvand, Jan Verwoert, Chiara Figone

A conference, hosted by the International Center for the Arts José de Guimarães, borrowed its title from an unfinished film stored in an archive in Bissau. Luta ca caba inda (The struggle is not over yet) was conceived as a documentary film on post-independence Guinea-Bissau, but was abandoned in the editing process in 1980.

The archive testifies to a decade of collective and internationally connected cinema praxis in the country, as part of the people’s struggle for independence from Portuguese colonialism. Fifteen contributors brought their expertise to the task of re-visiting a period of revolutions whose reverberations can still be felt today. A rare coming together of artistic, juridical, cinematographic, curatorial and academic practices, the conference was not only a timely and important occasion to address issues of the post-colony in Portugal, but it also yielded new and experimental ways of convening around an archive, convoking conflicts and probing its topicality in the present.

It took place in a room in which, echoing Édouard Glissant’s notion of the ‘Creole garden’, plants, archival objects, technical props, furniture and people were arranged on equal terms.

To Become Two: Propositions for Feminist Collective Practice offers a narrative of artist Alex Martinis Roe’s research into a genealogy of feminist political practices in Europe and Australia from the seventies until today.

These practices include those of the Milan Women’s Bookstore co-operative; Psychanalyse et Politique, Paris; Gender Studies (formerly Women’s Studies) at Utrecht University; a network in Sydney including people involved in the Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative, Feminist Film Workers, Working Papers Collective, and the Department of General Philosophy at Sydney University; and Duoda – Women’s Research Centre and Ca la Dona, a women’s documentation centre and encounter space in Barcelona.

Drawing from their practices and experiences, Martinis Roe’s research forms a proposal for a transgenerational approach to feminist politics. This is further developed as a practical handbook of twenty new propositions for feminist collective practice, which were formed in collaboration with a network of contributors through experiments with these historical practices.

Sowing Somankidi Coura. A Generative Archive is a long-term research endeavor by Raphaël Grisey in collaboration with Bouba Touré around the permacultures and archives of Somankidi Coura, a self-organized cooperative along the Senegal river founded by a group of former African migrant workers and activists in France in 1977 after the Sahel drought of 1973.

The book assembles texts, voices, images, takes, retakes and research around the Pan-African history of the cooperative of Somankidi Coura, the liberation struggles of migrant workers and farmers in France and West Africa. It enables thinking a politics of decolonisation for agriculture, migration, care, soil and the archive.

Mettant au travail un concept esquissé par la théoricienne Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (qui opère la distinction entre lecture paranoïaque et lecture réparatrice, cette dernière refusant de séparer le blanc des faits du jaune de l’imagination), ce livre se soutient d’une conviction : lorsqu’elle entend partir de la non-effectivité sexe-genre pour libérer, non seulement notre manière d’envisager les identités sexuelles, mais bien la façon de penser le monde, la théorie queer communique avec de multiples avancées parallèles qui, dans les sciences sociales et la philosophie contemporaines, entendent de même se frayer un chemin à travers les clivages et les dualismes entre nature et culture, corps et esprit, monde imaginaire et monde réel, individu et communauté.