Film and Almost Film 2002

24 october, 2002 - 15 november, 2002
Place
Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Harun Farocki. Auge / Maschine I, 2001
Harun Farocki. Auge / Maschine I, 2001

From beyond the conventional boundaries of the art world, Film and Almost Film returns with 45 pieces that transform visual perception and contribute ideas in equal measure. While the selection criteria in earlier years leaned towards artistic innovation in contemporary art, this year the guidelines have opened up to include documentary and fiction films by new directors in order to move past a simple modification or questioning of the dominant codes in audiovisual art, presenting various ways of reinterpreting visual dimensions in works that represent many of the contemporary tactics used to alter and deal with hegemonic models in an audiovisual context. The programme focuses on other forms of narrative and on alternative ways of telling stories. Given the chaotic reality of narrative – the result, perhaps, of the variety of possibilities and focuses – Film and Almost Film 2002 highlights the energy to be found in the vast field of audiovisual activity, where traditional notions of narrative have given way to a new, more fragmented culture, both in drama and documentary.

The notable presence of a certain type of documentary sensibility is, without a doubt, a key aspect of this selection, which does not have a fixed, truthful, historical starting point, but rather conceives of fiction as a document. Often, the story is constructed using existing ‘texts’, not taking any source for granted, or based on everything: commercial films, archive images, home video or surveillance camera recordings. Fragments of period films, whether fictional or not, are used to obtain historical references. In other works, the images are not even taken using the director’s camera, for example with Vertigo (2000), by Les LeVeque (Cortex, 1952) and Film ist (7-12) (2002) by Gustav Deutsch (Vienna, 1952). The importance of found images and sounds – and found footage from experimental film – stands out in several of the Film and Almost Film 2002 sessions, a reflection of the growing popularity of this genre within contemporary art. In this context, the everyday problems of art and film serve as links that are revisited and extended from the technological point of view of the image as well as from all the experiments done by artists whose search has taken them beyond narrative.