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.   

Céline Sciamma’s directorial debut, Naissance des pieuvres,depicts the emotional and sexual awakening of three teenagers around an indoor swimming pool in a Parisian suburb. Marie, a fifteen-year-old introvert, becomes fascinated by Floriane, the charismatic captain of a local synchronised swimming team. Driven by this attraction, Marie tries to get closer to her while observing the complex dynamics of desire, friendship and power that develops between the young girls. At the same time, Anne, one of Marie’s friends, has her own experience of insecurity and affective search, shaped by the pressure to fit in and belong. As the relationship between the three intensifies, contradictions surface between the image they outwardly project and their real feelings.  

Standing away from the common places on adolescence, Céline Sciamma explores first love, burgeoning queer identity and the uncertainty of desire with an intimate, observational gaze, resulting in a sensitive and honest portrait of a time of transformation, in which each gesture leads to the passage from childhood to adulthood.

Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff), a famous Hollywood actor, lives a life of pleasure in Hotel Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, drifting aimlessly between vacuous relationships, punctuated by film shoots and commercial duties. Cleo (Elle Fanning), his eleven-year-old daughter, stays with him for a few weeks due to her mother’s absence, forcing him to rethink his life.  

Sofia Coppola’s employment of swimming pools is carefully considered in the film — blue water in Somewhere is the only place where Marco can recover the meaning of his existence as the pool acts as a womb in which he finds balance. While living with his daughter Cleo and the reflection of these aquatic moments — diving under water, floating, playing or simply sunbathing with no real purpose — everything happens. Thus, Coppola explores in depth themes such as fame, loneliness and the complexity of human ties, putting forward an intimate and profound portrait full of the subtleties of life.

Gal Dove (Ray Winstone), a criminal for the British mafia, lives happily retired with his wife in an idyllic villa in southern Spain and a dazzling swimming pool. Their peace is shattered with the arrival of Don Logan (Ben Kingsley), a former gangster and criminal associate who wants to convince him to do one last job.  

If a swimming pool can be at the heart of suspense, then Sexy Beast is the quintessence. The reflection of blue water in Gal’s idyllic seclusion symbolises the artificial paradise that can be broken at any time. This first feature-length film by British director Jonathan Glazer (also the director of The Zone of Interest, 2023) starts with one of the most striking swimming pool scenes, a symbol for the impending danger about to reach this whitewashed haven of peace. The perfect vision of recreated beauty — luxury pools on the Andalusian coast — which, in the depths of pristine water, conceals an unsettling fear of returning to the past.

Sarah Morton (Charlotte Rampling), a frustrated English writer paralysed by writer’s block, is invited by her editor to spend a few days in her summer house in the south of France. While there she meets Julie (Ludivine Sagnier), the editor’s uninhibited daughter. The young girl’s hypersexuality clashes with Morton’s cold nature, an initial hostility which turns into a fascination with the private life of the young girl, serving the writer as inspiration for her new novel and tugging the story to an ambiguous game between truth and imagination.   

Being in crisis is wanting to be another person. Sarah wants to absorb the vitality of her young host, a process of metamorphosis triggered by the swimming pool. The pool is the film’s central character, the place where Julie shows her naked body and amorous acts, sending Sarah into a state of agitation. Through the pool and its water, the writer drinks in Julie’s wild passion. The aquatic enclosure thus acts as catharsis: the place where the subconscious of the writer flourishes, enabling her to unleash her creativity and free her fantasies. At the same time, water distorts the image, blurring fiction and reality; ultimately, the necessary medium to keep art afloat.

The body in water as an object of ideology. This is one of the major themes of the 1930s and this session, where Nazism and Anarchism dissolve into two different swimming pools. Two great films of counterposed ideologies which have gone down in history as examples of film’s power to represent a vision of the world. In Olympia, Part 2. Festival of Beauty, Leni Riefenstahl films the Olympic Games of Berlin in 1936, organised during the Third Reich. The camera leaves the athletics stadium to show the repertoire of modern sports — fencing, polo, cycling, pentathlon — before culminating in the Olympic pool with Adolf Hitler as the host, where the beautiful, disciplined, classical bodies of the swimmers bring to mind, as Susan Sontag wrote, the visual fascination that characterised fascism. Meanwhile, Jean Vigo, the son of an exiled Spanish anarchist, films French Olympic champion Jean Taris in a funny, playful exercise, where the swimming pool becomes a field of play without rules and where avant-garde film-making elements of the 1930s materialise, such as slow motion, superimposed images and dynamic editing. Two avant-garde films, two films on opposite poles that show, for a time, swimming not as an object of pleasure or desire, but as a space of contest from which to demonstrate the power of the twentieth century’s great ideologies.