Éclaboussements

It is both its strength and embarrassment. The cinema knows it is capable to produce as many flash as disappointment.

We built this programme with the desire to mix aesthetics shocks (the rare beauty of some Dwoskin, Wojnarowicz, Limura…) and movies looking for a speech (from Rithy Panh to Guy Debord). There isn't any moral attempt to make amends or to "clean" Agata's images. Yet, it is a matter of observing during two hours how, in response to Agata's images and the feeling they convey, movies have to chose between pain and pleasure making them more radicals in their perception of the world."

Formerly, we can read 'Suitable for a mature audience' at the entrance of screenings. Let's bet that after this four nights, you will be more mature than any audience. "

Philippe Azoury

Expériences / Tuesday January 15, 2013 - 8 PM

Dirty, Stephen Dwoskin, 1971, 12’ 
Ai (Love), Taka Iimura, 1962, 10’ 
Aka Ana, Antoine d’Agata, 2008, vost, 22’ 
A Fire in my belly, David Wojnarowicz, 1986-87, sil., 21’ 
El Carrer, Joan Colom, 1960, sil., 30’

This screening gathers a handful of movies keeping similarities with some themes of Agata's work : Night, madness, the other, to surpasse oneself. Each with its own way, this experimental works surround Aka Ana, a movie "work in progress" directed by Antoine d'Agata in 2006 and constantly edited by him. Expériences starts with two outbursts signed by Stephen Dwoskin and Taka Limura. Two movies with a great plastic beauty and an excessive urge in the framing, where camera wished it can go beyond the image surface, in the grain, in the depths of skin and feeling. The same urge inhabits Aka Ana, presented here in a new montage produced for the exhibition L'Image d'après, at the Cinémathèque in 2007. D'Agata allowed six womans met in Tokyo to tell their stories and to disrupt the movie point of view. The screening will end upon A Fire in my belly, an exuberant recorded poem by New yorker artist David Wojnarowicz in which he sinks himself into a dream of desire and death during a trip to Mexico. Then, night will fall on El Raval, the thugs, sailors and prostitutes neighborhood of Barcelona with El Carrer, recorded with a Super 8 in the beginning of the 60s by the one who photographs it his all life, Juan Colom.

Agonie / Tuesday February 12, 2013 - 8 PM

Main Line, Michel Bulteau, 1971, 12’ 
Pain is..., Stephen Dowskin, 1997, 80’

In 1971, Michel Bulteau and his friend, the poet Patrick Geoffrois rob a pharmacy. Then, with an hypodermic syringe, they inject themselves everything they find in order to record it from the inside and letting their shivers direct the storyline. Main Line is an experimental movie (as we say in the lab), which has the bitter-tasting of a kiss with Death itself... In Pain is..., Stephen Dwoskin considers pain as a curative virtue. The pain and every face of it... This will be the subject of an first-person inquiry where the masochistic ritual of the director will review every philosophical ideas convey by pain. Facing eath others, these films glance in a flirtatious way at the idea of agony.

Abattage / Tuesday March 19, 2013 - 8 PM

Le sang des bêtes, Georges Franju, 1949, vf, 21’ 
Le papier ne peut pas envelopper la braise, Rithy Panh, 2007, vostf, 86’

For Georges Franju, who just directed Le sang des bêtes in the slaughterhouse of Vaugirard and La Villette, dehairers represented the most concise metaphor of a world which, in 1949, just found out about the concentration camps. Sixty years later, Rithy Panh collects the words of prostitutes from Phnom Penh with the same attention she gave to the survivors of the Khmers death camps. Le papier ne peut pas envelopper la braise has been recorded five years after the unforgettable S-21, the death machine of the Khmers. It is, in some symbolical way, its dreadful sequel.

Situation / Tuesday April 16, 2013 - 8 PM

Marseille vieux port, László Moholy-Nagy, 1929, 3’,VF
Mise au point, Ode Bitton, 1972,13’ VF, 16MM 
In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, Guy Debord, 1978, 95’

In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni : we go round in circles in the night and are devoured by the fire. The longest latin palindrome gives his name to most lyrical movie by Guy Debord, a splendid introspective poem where, more than anywhere, the situationist thinker tells the essence of drifting as he denounces our slave condition. To begin this programme, three minutes of the wandering of the photograph Lázló Moholy-Nagy in the streets of the Vieux Port of Marseille, in the late 1920s. In the same years, in the same port, Walter Benjamin registered on paper some ideas born under the consumption of haschisch. At the beginning of the 70s, before he commits suicide in 1972, it is the poet and painter Gabriel Pommerand, one of the first comrade of Debord with Isidore Isou, who let the director Ode Bitton recorded his opium ritual.