Present Time: Insurgent Images

If cinema does not set out to reach objectivity then each film takes a biased view of observed reality. The session begins with the seemingly neutral view of Cao Guimarães to observe a boy and girl playing in the rain in Da Janela do Meu Cuarto (From the Window of My Room, 2004). A work, deceptively relaxed, which prefigures one of the session’s constants: the place of childhood as a project of worlds to come. The boundless urban vitality of Barcelona Joan Colom portrays in El carrer (The Street, 1960) comes face to face with the extraordinary Niños (Children, 1974), by the Grupo de Cine Liberación sin Rodeos, a multi-voiced depiction of a group of friends in Cuzco whose citizen-focused schooling co-exists, just, with their daily work and reveals the limitations of the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces in Peru. Visión de la selva (View of the Jungle, 1973), by the same Peruvian collective, puts forward another model of representation and intervention on the public sphere with direct news activism, which denounces the plundering of the Amazon by multi-national companies. 

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. 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.

As a recap of the previous sessions, this screening considers a geography of past and present struggles: a refined formal approach, a portrait of popular life, the landscape testimony of working communities and the critique of accumulation and inequality. The monumental diptych Too Early, Too Late (1982) reflects Engels’s sharp analysis of the French Revolution, along with the enumeration of the distribution of taxes on different hamlets in the French countryside. In the second part, the account of Mahmoud Hussein — a pseudonym for Egyptian Marxist historians Bahgat El Nadi and Adel Rifaat — ranges across the memory of anti-imperialist citizen revolts in Egypt throughout the twentieth century. The film destabilises stereotypes and common places of political insurgency in the North African country. Recovering and circulating this latent memory helps to name that which still resists being named and, as Straub y Huillet indicate, “making the revolution is to put very old yet forgotten things back in their place”.  

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. 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.

Time, light, vision. What is an image? How does an image make us see the world? First, hypnosis, a reset: Paulino Viota’s Duración (Duration, 1970), the portrait of a clock face over sixty seconds. Next, a window into a slightly altered reality: Javier Aguirre’s Objetivo 40º (40 Degree Lens, 1968–1970). A minimum intervention that inspires a session considered as successive immersions in blocks of time, as well as a journey that starts from the intimacy of a candle, the movement of a car around abandoned peripheries and the traces of anti-Franco protestors, with night falling to the emotive, profound and sharp voice of Ocaña. Now in 1990, the journey ends at other street protests, those articulated by the Agustín Parejo School collective owing to the housing problem in Málaga. As Javier Aguirre states: “It is not about achieving the objective. It is about demystifying it”.     

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. 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.   

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.