The Collection Screened

The Collection Screened is a new programme built around materials selected from the Museo Reina Sofía’s film, video and moving image holdings and displayed in the Museo’s Cinema theatre. The programme seeks at once to throw into relief audiovisual works which are seldom exhibited or lack visibility in their entirety and to highlight or broaden an episode, history or artist that is part of the Museo Reina Sofía Collections.     

This inaugural programme pays homage to the uniqueness of film-maker Adolpho Arrietta, a pivotal figure in international underground cinema, with the screening of two films by the director acquired by the Museo in 2012: Las intrigas de Sylvia Couski (The Adventures of Sylvia Couski, 1974) and Tam-tam (1976), in addition to a carte blanche session, where Arrietta selects Jonas Mekas’s film The Brig (1964) from the Museo’s Film Collection. The director will deliver a presentation in all sessions.

Inside the framework of The Collection Screened is the programme Vital Challenge: Defiant Actions from and about the Body, curated by Laura Baigorri, one of the leading specialists in video art. The programme seeks to explore specific aspects related to identity and self-representation, which coalesce to form a point of departure and a horizon that stretches across the Museo’s audiovisual collection since the 1990s. The screenings in this programme also converse with pioneering approaches from the 1970s and 1980s focused on audiovisual experimentation and traversed by a vindication of the body and identities.   

The series, moreover, is structured around three double-screening sessions: We Go On from Here… And Will Not Move approaches performance based on the self-display of the body; Other Voices in Us All prompts a confrontation of reason from sensibility and emotion; and Economy of Hate premieres Diego del Pozo Barriuso’s Oído Odio (Heard Hate).

Framed inside The Collection Screened is the programme Present Time: Insurgent Images, curated by Luis López Carrasco, a key film-maker with a distinguished international career whose work deals with memory, activism and collectivity. The works in the programme, selected from the Museo’s film and video collection, interlink projects that are conceptual, refined, systematic — as an X-ray of their time in history — with firebrand domestic and activist films, comprehending different political emergencies from the second half of the twentieth century in Europe and Latin America. These works are viewed in light of a genealogy of revolt which buries its roots in the nineteenth century.    

For theorist Siegfried Kracauer, one essential distinguishing feature of the film image is its capacity to depict daily life — film captures fragments of the lives of anonymous people with unprecedented closeness and intimacy. French critic Serge Daney also considered the moving image as an “art of the present”, a mode of representation which captures a specific segment of time, a time which unfolds before our eyes in each screening.   

Present Time. Insurgent Images sets forth a micro-history of daily life under Franco’s dictatorship, from the popular and Cartesian depiction of the Puerta del Sol set out by Javier Aguirre in Objetivo 40º (1968–1970) to the revealing panoramic views of urban fringes by Dorothée Selz in Desplaçaments dels aparells d’imatges i so (1974), via street, child and proletarian expression rarely shown with the rawness with which Joan Colom portrays Barcelona in the 1960s in El carrer. This micro-history entwines the 1970s, rural ethnography and the anti-imperialist stance of the Grupo de Cine Liberación sin Rodeos from Peru, whose emancipatory message reverberates in the chronology of the anti-capitalist and anti-colonial movements of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, a session which concludes Luis López Carrasco’s essay based on the Museo’s audiovisual collection.    

The series, moreover, shows private images that possess the will to be public. Images which project futures in which these insurgent energies can find audiences to proliferate through; images which seek, in conclusion, to recall that which must not be forgotten and to speak in an increasingly urgent way about our present. 

Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) is a young graduate from a wealthy California family. After returning home he meets Mrs Robinson (Anne Bancroft), who seduces him in successive encounters and shows him things that can’t be read in books. Mrs Robinson’s daughter, Elaine (Katharine Ross), enters his life to turn his feelings upside down. 

Anne Bancroft’s remarkable performance shows the need to feel alive in a world gone stale, and the weapons sex possesses opposite romantic love. This is the learning curve young Ben experiences, and it is the time he spends drifting in the swimming pool that takes him from bewilderment to lucidity. He goes from a fool in a wetsuit lost at the bottom of the pool, to letting himself sway on the waters of pleasure or to see the mantle of the pool covered in fallen leaves with the arrival of love. The swimming pool is the place that initiates a change of state: an awakening of life forces. 

The end of the world, caused by climate change, is here and a group of friends wander from swimming pool to swimming pool at the height of a long, hot summer in Buenos Aires. From pool to pool, they cross the city, drifting leisurely and agreeably. In this transit they encounter different survivors searching desperately for water until their journey ends.    

In echoing Frank Perry and Sydney Pollack’s film The Swimmer, Sol Iglesias’s The Swimmers is, equally, a path towards first light. The swimming pools symbolise, on this sunburnt stage, a metaphor at once for shelter and death by asphyxiation. It is the extreme heat that turns it into a fresh and pleasurable ending. The swimming pool, moreover, represents the lethargy of a youth tired of fighting against something they see as “inevitable”. As the young people trespass on a neighbourhood’s private property — rather than in public space — the pool is a stronghold of intimacy that must be seized: the false paradise of a collapsed society. The film brings the viewer closer to another film to feature in this series, La ciénaga (The Swamp, 2001) by Lucrecia Martel, in which bodies search for recesses of stagnant water.

Painting endows a fleeting and unique moment with permanence and stability. This was the vision of the late David Hockney when, brushstroke by brushstroke, he returned to the swimming pool in A Bigger Splash: the great dive into a Californian pool which freezes a sense of happiness. A splash made by Peter Schlesinger, the painter’s partner from whom he has just separated.   

In the film A Bigger Splash, Jack Hazan portrays the world of a successful artist, art-market and art-dealer pressure, the tension between the ego and personal frailty, and the obligation to continue with a style and iconography which, despite its instantly recognisable artistic imprint, creates doubts for the painter. In a grey, rainy London, a glum Hockney, the victim of soured love, keeps returning to the Californian swimming pool that holds the promise of happiness, in the form of a homosexual Arcadia in which the painter lives with his young partner and a group of equally glowing and attractive friends. Ultimately, the pool, as Jack Hazan recalls in this pioneering artist’s documentary, is a simile for the same painting in its original intention: hang onto fleetingness to lend it a permanence for the beholder, despite it not existing. Hockney, as one of the last great painters, knew his medium remained largely unchanged across hundreds of years of history.

For the first time, the Museo’s summer cinema programme includes an experimental film section, centred on the experience and feeling of bodies under water. This session glides between the ostentatious aquatic architecture of Barbara Hammer and Barbara Klutinis and Jakobois’s fantasies, fleeting contact and wet, sexualised bodies. Six completely different swimming pools — private, public, transparent, bottomless, indoor, outdoor — all designed for leisure, competition and desire, nonetheless. A journey ranging from the monumentality of architecture to the intimacy of wet bodies.    

Pools, by Barbara Hammer and Barbara Klutinis, turns swimming pools designed by pioneering architect Julia Morgan for the castle of tycoon William Randolph Hearst — the inspiration for Citizen Kane — into a space of play, bodily exploration and queer appropriation, an excuse to dive into a scene reserved for privilege. In An Algorithm, Bette Gordon fragments a series of headfirst dives and turns the sporting gesture into a visual score of repetitions, variations and rhythms. Tony Hill’s Water Work seduces with perspective, reflections and depth — the swimming pool as optical illusion, as an unstable surface which distorts and multiplies the gaze. Cheap Imitation “They Walk and I Walk”, by Rickard Eklund, submerges the camera to capture a choreography of synchronized bodies, a dance suspended under water. Naked bodies that dodge, twist and embrace in a space seemingly with no gravity combine in Gunilla Leander’s All Under. Passage du désir, by Jakobois, closes the programme with a montage in which water is no longer an environment, becoming instead a territory of desire.  

Two gems, from two new voices in Latin American cinema, which swing between families, swimming pools, reencounters and status. In Debajo, a short film on youth by Chilean director Dominga Sotomayor, an abstract yet powerful bird’s-eye view of a swimming pool co-exists with the relationships of a crisis-stricken family, gathered to see an eclipse. Sotomayor’s distinctive film-making of care and affects shares a similar space to the daily naturalism of Thais Fujinaga’s A Felicidade das Coisas. In the director’s first feature film, the swimming pool is not a horizontal basin for swimmers’ immersion; rather it is a huge vertical monolith, a kind of an anti-monument, anchored in the garden of a middle-class family. The film conveys the efforts and challenges of a mother of two children to build a swimming pool in their modest summer house, a mother who, alone, comes up against a hypermasculine world. Equally, the film speaks of family love, and the search for status, with the swimming pool a languishing totem of the Brazilian middle class during the years of Bolsonarism.