“I’m always here, there, everywhere”. That’s how Barbara Rubin ends one of her candid letters [1] to Jonas Mekas. And so she was, be it in a sanitarium, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, Warhol’s Factory, Allen Ginsberg’s East Hill Farm, New York or Europe. Rubin was on a rush, and time proved her right. Her sudden death occurred when she was just 35, by that time living under a different name as a converted Hasidic mother of five children.
The first scene also remains the strongest: the small family (mum, dad, son and dog) drives in the family car towards the holiday home in Long Island. The car offers safety, is hermetically sealed, no sound from the outside world penetrates the vehicle, which literally pours itself into the landscape at high speed and routinely moves towards its destination. The sun glitters through the windows and Mama pushes a punk CD into the system.
The real Lola Arias, not the fictional artist name-placed in the 2017 Palme D’Or winning film, has spent the past ten years making her first feature film titled Theatre of War, which premiered in 2018 at the 68 Berlinale Forum. The film brings together former Argentine and British soldiers to recreate the military dispute over the Falkland Islands or las Maldivias, as they are called in Argentina and in the Spanish language.
-“So here I am, alone on this earth, with no brother, neighbour, or friend, and no company but my own. The most sociable and loving of human beings has by common consent been banished by the rest of society” laments Jean-Jacques Rousseau at the beginning of the first walk in his unfinished book Reveries of the Solitary Walker (here in Russell Goulbourne’s translation).
Artist Peggy Ahwesh’s work, marked by vagrancy and hybridity in its methods and subjects, has been deploying bricolage in a disquietingly reflective fashion, which would partake of the task of what one might call ‘essay-filmmaking.’ Far from a merely frivolous or adventurous exploration of different mediums and materiality, Ahwesh’s heterogeneous body of work proposes cautionary, counteractive thoughts on contemporary human and non-human conditions, primarily siding with the materiality of the deprived drifting in the shadow of automated media and imaging technologies.
Jürgen Heiter’s films talk about something already shaped – about places. The bookshop “König“ in Cologne, the Rolandseck railway station – or the small town of Olevano in Italy. They do not present these places in a documentary way, but rather investigate the forces at these places, structures, movements, what the places do with the people and what the people do with the places.
Multimedia artist Ben Coonley’s show Winter Games (February 15 to March 24, 2019) at Microscope Gallery (Bushwick, NY, USA) projects the poetics of ecological togetherness and its reparative rituals in a slow wintry refuge by weaving together technologies and remediated reflection on nature, time, kinship and play.
‘Is the resistance of reality to be filmed going away?’ asked film critic and programmer Roger Koza during the discussion at the Berlin Critics’ Week moderated by Michael Hack after the screening of Fausto by Andrea Bussmann, her first feature film that premiered in last year’s Locarno Film Festival. Bussmann is known for her work with Nicolás Pereda with whom she made Tales of Two Who Dreamt in 2016.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Richard Brooks, like his 1955 Tennessee Williams play, is gracious with its main characters. And this grace is shown first of all in the stamina that Williams already bestows on them in his stage version. Margaret also needs stamina. This is a big country.
In recent decades, there’s been growing attention to territorially marginal land(scape) and inhabitants therein in documentary filmmaking practice responding to acutely arising awareness of ecology of preserved or autochthonous habitats in ways of pursuing sustainable and ethical ways of living together.
With the advent of new technologies, there are clearly more and more artists who are experimenting with the emergent possibilities. TENT is relatively a new open-space in Calcutta, INDIA, that came into being starting December 2012 and since then is calling out to artists willing to plunge into this new prospect and expand the meaning of existing art practices by transgressing the boundaries. where perhaps the amateur, reckless and even the madcap will produce the new drift of art.
