Comment Filmer? is a reflection on how to capture and subsequently present "reality", while touching on the consequences and responsibilities these choices entail.
This screening is inspired by Johan Grimonprez's Comment Filmer Molenbeek? (1994), a video in which the artist addresses agency in documentary filmmaking through the recording of a film workshop involving teenagers in Molenbeek. Grimonprez's video is a response to media depictions of this marginalized Brussels neighbourhood, which alternated problematic representation with erasure at the time. The work constructs a powerful counterimage by giving the workshop participants a camera and full agency over what they record.
In thinking about capturing "reality" critically, the artists in this program similarly bypass habitual hierarchies of documentary production and imagination while using the medium to foreground alternately political, intimate, humorous, painful, or intimate approaches to the process of filmmaking itself.
The program is curated by Niels Van Tomme, argos centre for audiovisual arts.
This short film by Johan Grimonprez is the result of a workshop in which artist Franciska Lambrechts gave teenagers a super-8 camera with 3 B/W films and audio recording equipment. The participants of the workshop were asked to capture the neighbourhood in which they live: Molenbeek. The resulting film is a creative montage of image and sound in which the workshop and the various topics that were discussed by the teenagers take centre stage.… >>>
Premiere:
German Premiere
- Director: Johan Grimonprez
PRINTED MATTER displays the conflation of private lives and contemporary geopolitics.
The father of Sirah Foighel Brutmann was a press photographer who documented the news in the Middle East for two decades. The film consists entirely of contact prints and photographic negatives from the father's archive, showing images of civil dissent, armed violence, funeral grief, and political speech in both Israel and the occupied Territories. These official photographs are occasionally intermixed with intimate pictures of the photographer's family.
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- Director: Sirah Foighel Brutmann, Eitan Efrat
In this first part of the Incompetence cycle, artist Justine Cappelle focuses on the inability to show images. The film is based on a conversation Cappelle had with the Chinese film director Zao Wang who experienced an extreme form of censorship while making a film. He saw his feature “The Lost Sail ” transform into “The Precipice Game ” and talks about how this transformation took place.… >>>
- Director: Justine Cappelle
A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF CLARITY is composed of internet found footage circulating in an online community of teenagers that responds to a viral video showing an actual murder. The teenagers capture their emotional responses in order to expose themselves online. The murder video perpetually offscreen, the off-camera horror clones itself in the imagination of the viewer while simultaneously preventing the possibility to adopt the position of witness.… >>>
- Director: Emmanuel Van der Auwera
A woman sets out to photograph moments of intimacy. On an internet dating site she writes: "I’m looking for people who would like to be photographed in public revealing something of themselves…" What I’m Looking For documents this adventure, as well as the connections formed at the intersection between virtual and actual public space. The video is a rumination on the nature of photography and the persistence of vision. It is a short tale of desire and control.… >>>
