Screening program in the framework of Cinemaniac > Think Film 2020
support program at 67th Pula Film Festival
Monday 31. 8. u 8.30 PM @ ECPD, Kapitolinski trg

Series for Invisible Cinema
Her deceit is the sun, her truth the sea
– Gustav Deutsch, The Otolith Group
curated by Tanja Vrvilo

Series for invisible cinema, a long-term multimedia action for reflection on modes of transmission of images, knowledge and memory of the film dispositif in the digital age, this year are dedicated to the perturbations of appropriation, displacement and curation of one of most inspired artist’s pedagogies, Chris Marker’s Owl Legacy, with 13 symposia under the sign of the totemic and iconic owl – Athena noctua, associated with Greek goddess of wisdom and war Athena and her Roman double Minerva. Marker’s TV symposium essays on what is left of (ancient) wisdom from the forgotten archive of television were made in the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall and banned by the Greek authorities before broadcasting; the work was shown in its original form only once, in 1991 on ARTE and Channel 4. Filmed in five cities over two years with 59 participants, it develops a collective archeology of knowledge on the key heritage of ancient Greece, as well as pre-digital television strategy, at the last minute of the disintegration of political communities and the cultural end of XXth century. Two decades later, the radical art and theory The Otolith Group, in collaboration with Marker, actualized the remediation for the 13-channel video installation Inner Time of Television, a monument to dead television, at the First Athens Biennale of 2007, entitled Destroy Athens!, re-mapping Marker’s project of memorialization in the age of poststructuralism, postcolonialism and postmodernism for its first presentation in Greece. Marker’s subtitle: 13 Greek Words Deciphered By…. is staging a feast of inherited words Symposium, Olympics, Democracy, Nostalgia, History, Mathematics, Logomachy, Music, Cosmogony, Mythology, Misogyny, Tragedy, Philosophy. We are expanding rhizomatic thesaurus of Athena noctua to the afterlife of cinema, in this program the liquid perception and oceanic feeling of Adria and Hydra, after the fourth and tenth symposium: Nostalgia or Impossible Return and Mythology or Lies Like Truth, which link temporality of nostalgia, migrations, mutations and life after the exodus, deciphered by Gustav Deutsch and the Otolith group, with invisible symposiarch Chris Marker.

FILMS:

Gustav Deutsch: Adria Urlaubsfilme 1954-68 (Die Schule des Sehens I) / Adria Holiday Films 1954-68 (Film–School of Seeing I)
1989., 37 min; silent, col + b/w

Adria by Gustav Deutsch sheds light on the beginnings of the artist’s phenomenology of the film medium created using found footage, in this case, Austrian home and amateur films from the holidays at the Italian and Croatian coast of the Adriatic Sea. By analyzing and recomposing actions and reactions, focal points, and serial aspects, Deutsch’s pedagogy reveals what people do with the camera and what the camera does with them in the specific social context of their first holiday abroad and organizing leisure time. Recording a shared experience becomes a school of viewing, an evidence of active filmic and social ritual.

The Otolith Group: Hydra Decapita, 2010., 31 min
sound, colour

Hydra Decapita, the first part of the mythical trilogy of film essays by London based The Otolith Group by Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar give voices to the decapitated underwater world. A complex fantastic-political net of meanings connect the historical atrocity from 1781, when the captain of the slave ship called Zong travelling from Jamaica to Liverpool decided to throw all 133 saves overboard so that he could claim insurance for the loss of cargo, and also J.M.W. Turner’s painting of the same crime The Slave Ship (and Ruskin’s analysis of the painting) with the conceptual Afro-futuristic music of the group Drexciya, by James Stinson and Gerald Donald (1992-2002), about the underwater kingdom of the children of murdered slaves.

Filmovi I fotografije ljubaznošću / Films and photographs courtesy by LUX, The Otolith Group, sixpackfilm