illegal_cinema #6 – CINÉMA ET POLITIQUE (Kramer, Godard,…)

illegal_cinema #6

28 juin 2010

©1969-Robert Kramer (photo extraite de Ice)

lundi 28 juin, 19h30
Séance illegal_cinema #6

Ice, un film de Robert Kramer (États-Unis, 1969, 2h15)
Underground
, un film d’Emile de Antonio (États-Unis, 1976, 1h28)
Winter Soldier,
un film du groupe Winter-film (États-Unis, 1972, 1h36)
One P.M.
, un film de Jean-Luc Godard et D.A. Pennebaker (États-Unis, 1972, 1h30)

Cette séance, composée de quelques extraits de ces quatre films, est proposée et présentée par le new-yorkais Alexander Provan, écrivain et fondateur de la plateforme Triple Canopy.

©1972-D.A. Pennebaker & J.-L. Godard (photo extraite de One P.M.)

Le poids de l’air / The weight of air (par A. Provan) :

Prenant part aux séances d’illegal_cinema conçu par la plateforme serbe TkH-Walking Theory, le rédacteur en chef de Triple Canopy, Alexander Provan, présentera une projection de travaux censurés ou marginaux issus d’une collaboration entre des réalisateurs et des activistes, ou qui rend poreuse la frontière entre les deux, invalidant par là même la distinction entre l’action et la représentation, la propagande et l’art. Succédera à cette projection une discussion autour de la nostalgie qui entoure la relation entre l’expérimentation filmique, l’autorité artistique, et la politique gauchiste, les technologies “de récit de la vérité” et les personnages, dans les années 1960 et 1970. Nous réfléchirons aussi sur le pouvoir des partis politiques de droite sur leur propres modes d’auto-représentation, comparables aux modes utilisés par les partis adverses.

Les séances d’illegal_cinema se déroulent tous les lundis à 19h30 aux Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers.

illegal_cinema

illegal_cinema est la version française du projet conçu par le collectif serbe TkH – Walking Theory à Belgrade: dans ce projet, “illégal” signifie inciter à une autre forme de production de savoir et de discours au sein de non-spécialistes du film, autour de productions plus expérimentales, critiques ou minoritaires. Toute personne intéressée peut proposer un film avec l’obligation d’en parler, d’ouvrir une discussion ou d’inviter des intervenants. Ce procédé tente d’annuler les frontières entre programmateur et public, de mettre en œuvre un processus d’auto éducation à long terme et de créer une communauté culturelle critique.
Aux Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, les procédures et les contenus d’illegal_cinema seront développés et transformés dans le contexte de la scène parisienne. Le projet aura lieu tous les lundis à 19h30, dans le cadre de la résidence HOW TO DO THINGS BY THEORY de la plateforme TkH aux Laboratoires. Plus d’informations sur www.howtodothingsbytheory.info

illegal_cinema sur internet : sur le site des Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers (calendrier des films projetés et des contributeurs), inscription à la mailing-list d’illegal_cinema, rejoindre le groupe illegal_cinema sur Facebook.

Appel à participation

Seriez-vous intéressé/e par proposer un film ou une série de films ou tout simplement participer aux discussions ? Pourriez-vous avoir l’amabilité de diffuser l’appel à participation ci-joint autour de vous, afin que le projet s’ouvre au plus grand nombre?

Pour plus d’informations ou pour proposer un film, n’hésitez pas à contacter Mathieu Lericq au 01 53 56 15 90 et par e-mail: m.lericq@leslaboratoires.org

Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers
41 rue Lécuyer
93300 Aubervilliers
+33(0)1 53 56 15 90
info@leslaboratoires.org
http://www.leslaboratoires.org/
Accès: M° Quatre Chemins Pantin-Aubervilliers (ligne 7)

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1 Comment »

  1. koutouzis says:

    Jazz et dope, espoir et frustration sublimés

    « Le jazz », me racontait mon père, « a rencontré son stade sublime en passant d’une musique rythmée africaine basée sur la percussion à celle, déstructurée, des cuivres ». C’est le combat mené contre l’essoufflement qui indique au mieux un dépassement sublime de la frustration. Le racisme, le chômage, la ségrégation et les espoirs perdus de l’après guerre de sécession, s’expriment ainsi par le passage du Gospel et du tambour aux saxos et trompettes.
    La musique ancestrale, transformée et véhiculée par le frénésie du corps, le piano (ajouté) et les percussions, se transforment en se sublimant : La musique, produite par des corps quasi immobiles, à la limite de la voix et du souffle, perdent le rythme lancinant africain et émergent dans la modernité urbaine et oppressive sous la forme du minimalisme guttural de Billy Holiday, accompagné d’un son strident, saccadé, véhiculant hargne et insatisfaction d’un «Bird» Charlie Parker.
    La cocaïne, « white Duke » en la circonstance, depuis la Nouvelle Orléans jusqu’à Chicago et tout au long du Mississipi, accompagne les révoltes mais aussi, en anesthésiant le palais, elle participe à la mutation du gospel en blues, celle de la ferveur religieuse au vague à l’âme existentiel.
    « Moins qu’un chien » titrait Mingus son livre, racontant les souvenirs de la marge, de cuites et de dope sous la constante répression policière et la ségrégation quotidienne. Free, libre, n’était que son jazz, le reste n’incarnait qu’ombres, jeu de miroirs entre une œuvre maudite et des spectacles de survie, que seul un cinéaste surgissant – et vivant – d’ ailleurs multiples, John Cassavetes, pouvait conceptualiser dans son film « Shadows » à la fin des années 1950 et dont Mingus écrira la musique. La version finale du film, financé par Nikos Papatakis, ami de Jean Genet et réalisateur du sublime « Abysses », donnera naissance au concept même d’underground. Un autre film underground, « Ice » de Robert Kramer (1969), relate, sous la forme ingénieuse de documentaire science fiction – déstructuré par du free jazz strident – de l’extermination des Wethermen par le FBI. Ces derniers s’aventuraient dans les années 1960-70 à la guérilla urbaine, mais participeront aussi à l’évasion de Timothy Leary le « pape de l’ LSD », et de son exfiltration en Algérie…
    Il y certes un parallèle à faire entre les descentes de police dans les cabarets malfamés où se produisait Mingus (mais aussi, plus tard à chacune des performances des Doors) et le plastiquage, en 1975, du cinéma Marbeuf par l’OAS, pour empêcher la séance de « Gloria Mundi » un film de Papatakis qui dénonçait la torture en Algérie, bien avant tout autre.
    Il y a paradoxalement un parallèle à faire aussi entre Kansas City et ses bars malfamés où, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonius Monk et Bird Parker (déjà « passés » à l’héroïne), attiraient critiques enthousiastes et ennuis policiers avec la « Rose Rouge », ce cabaret que créa Papatakis de toutes pièces en 1947 (où se produisit pour la première fois Juliette Gréco) et qui devint le rendez vous de toutes les personnalités du Quartier Latin, à commencer par Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir et Boris Vian. « J’irai cracher sur vos tombes », l’histoire d’un noir qui se cache derrière sa peau blanche, écrite par Vian (et qui se cache à son tour avec humour derrière un pseudonyme « américanisé »), n’est pas loin de « Shadows ». Plus violent, plus cru mais moins réaliste, l’œuvre décrit cette schizophrénie entre être un noir blanc en apparence mais se haïr pour cela et haïr a la fois ceux qui, au nom de leur « couleur », vous oppriment.
    « Colors » n’est il pas aussi le titre d’un film de Denis Hopper, des années plus tard, et qui décrit la galère de la police (blanche) d’être dans un quartier noir ravagé par le crack ? Hopper – bien plus jeune -, avait bouleversé la critique mais aussi enclenché une levée de boucliers bien pensants avec « Easy rider », où des red neks (des plouks) du Midwest (les temps changent, aujourd’hui ils sont accros de la met amphétamine) arrêtaient par une salve de chevrotines la chevauchée fantastique (en motos) de soixante-huitards épris de liberté sauvage et de « Marijanne », juste à cause de leurs cheveux longs.
    Si les grands espaces westerniens accompagnent le film, la musique, elle, est résolument heavy (avant la lettre) : « roll an other one, just like the other one », ce sont des paroles lancinantes, hypnotiques, voluptueuses.
    Si celles du « Pusher » sont de John Kay, le leader du groupe – un exilé de l’Allemagne de l’est -, Billy Holiday n’est pas loin. Paradoxalement, Nina Hagen non plus.
    Un autre adorateur de jazz, une sorte de Kerouac urbain, gauchiste pris par la spirale de la violence (ou de son manque), auteur des « souvenirs obscurs d’un juif polonais », tomba aussi sous les salves d’un commando des « protecteurs de l’honneur de la police » mais en vrai. Ses bourreaux, apparemment, n’acceptaient pas qu’un juif polonais soit innocent. Régis Debré, allant dans ce sens, écrira à propos de Pierre Goldmann dans « Les masques » : «Pour le public, il fut sauvé par l’holocauste comme moi par la guerre d’Espagne ».
    « Comme pour l’art, la vérité n’existe que dans le regard des autres », conclue Jim Williams, collectionneur sudiste, esthète et dépravé du film de Clint Eastwood, « Minuit dans le jardin du bien et du mal ».
    Encore un amoureux du jazz.

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Open Studio: PERFORMANCE AND THE PUBLIC / TkH at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers

PERFORMANCE AND THE PUBLIC: Open Studio
Les laboratoires d’Aubervilliers
December 8, 2012
5pm – 11pm

TkH [Walking Theory] will end their three-year long project How to Do Things by Theory with Open Studio: an occasion to present, share and discuss outcomes of various lines of investigation that this editorial collective from Belgrade pursued in Les Laboratories d’Aubervilliers from 2010 to 2012. Open Studio will show materials from Re-Hallucinating Contexts Paris-Belgrade (2010-2011), which confronted two independent art and cultural scenes; illegal_cinema, the practice of uncurated self-organized screenings of films in alternative production and knowledge exchange,   which is still going on in Les Laboratoires; Exhausting Immaterial Labor in Peformance, the joint issue of the journal TkH and Les Labos produced in public editing sessions. Finally, a special focus of this Open Studio is on the research project Performance and the Public that Ana Vujanović, Bojana Cvejić and Marta Popivoda carried out in 2011 and 2012. During Open Studio, TkH will launch the book Public Sphere by Performance written by Vujanović and Cvejić, and present the study for Yugoslavia: How Ideology Moved Our Collective Body, a film made by Marta Popivoda. TkH will also offer video materials from the workshop Performative Technologies of the Group that Cvejić conceived in collaboration with Popivoda, and Christine De Smedt and Siegmar Zacharias, with the participation of students from Paris VIII Dance studies and others.

The point of departure for this research is the recurrent problem of the public: the eclipse of the public sphere throughout the twentieth century as a marker of the crisis of representative democracy. The theoretical and political perspectives of this transdisciplinary research stem from the discontinuous experiences of participation in the public sphere in former socialist Yugoslavia and contemporary Western neoliberalism.TkH proposes an analysis of and discussion about the public––and its discontents––through several models of mass, collective and self-performances, such as social drama and social choreography. In numerous collaborations with artists, theoreticians, and activists in 2011, TkH have closely observed transversal social, artistic, and cultural artifacts and practices: movements, images, laws, habits, and discourses. The core motivation for the research that ranges from performance studies to political theory and social science can be illustrated by the following questions from the book’s preface:

…What has the role of the public been in all these historical and current moments? Even if the public has not been passive and invisible in all of them, what has its position and its power been? Did it effectuate changes? Moreover, even if it has had political and social effects, we are inclined to repeat John Dewey’s question: was this public aware of the consequences of its actions? …What did we ask for when we as a public arose in protest? And how does this correspond to what we got in return, supporting or opposing the one or the other political actor on the public scene? …What can we as citizens do with what we know and have “in our hands,” or in our case, with theoretical and practical expertise in the field of performance?

Programme
5-7pm Display of materials from How to Do Things by Theory with informal talks with Ana Vujanović, Bojana Cvejić and Marta Popivoda
7-8.30pm Talk about the research Performance and the Public and launch of the book Public Sphere by Performance by Ana Vujanović and Bojana Cvejić
8.30-9.15pm Dinner
9.15-10.15pm Screening of the study for the film Yugoslavia: How Ideology Moved Our Collective Body and aftertalk with Marta Popivoda
from 10.15pm Drinks

 

Workshop “PERFORMATIVE TECHNOLOGIES OF THE GROUP” / TkH @Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers

Walking Theory @Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers presents:

“Performative Technologies of the Group”
a workshop at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Ile de France
April 5-11

How can choreography and performance be used as instruments to form a group of individuals ad hoc who will collaborate on a project? What are the techniques of forming a group body of workers who never worked before? How does a worker exercise the skills of immaterial labor required for a “successful” collaboration: flexibility, communication skills, “openness,” curiosity in the other, non-conflictual problem-solving? How do individuals develop tactics to “dance” together in a group of equals? 

The workshop will simulate two distinct, but comparable situations of contemporary forms of labor: building a team of business workers, and gathering a group of performers for a project that relies on collaboration of all members. The aim of the workshop is to explore “group technologies” in the two different contexts: simulated situations with role-playing, games and exercises of group formation, individual and mass gestures etc.

Conceived and organized by Walking Theory (Bojana Cvejic)
Led by coaches Siegmar Zacharias and Christine De Smedt, and Bojana Cvejic
Filmed by Marta Popivoda and Maja Radosevic
Coordinator Virginie Bobin

The workshop is part of the project «How to do things by theory» (2010-2012) by Walking Theory collective comissioned and produced by cultural center Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers.

OPEN DAY #3: PERFORMANCE AND THE PUBLIC: Social Choreography and Social Drama / Walking Theory at Tanzfabrik Berlin

With: Antonia Baehr, Bojana Cvejić (TkH), Ole Frahm (Ligna), Isabell Lorey, Torsten Michaelsen (Ligna), Marta Popivoda (TkH), Nicolas Siepen (b_books), Ana Vujanović (TkH) and Siegmar Zacharias

In the frame of TkH [Walking Theory] residency “How To Do Things By Theory” at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers in Paris (2010-2012), the theoretical-artistic platform from Belgrade started a research about “Performance and the Public”.

Ana Vujanović, Bojana Cvejić and Marta Popivoda examine state performances as well as performances of the public and its citizens informed by two different contexts, socialist Yugoslavia and contemporary Western neoliberal capitalism.

For their OPEN DAY they featuring heterogeneous artifacts: movements, images, laws, habits, writings in various formats, e.g. “sharp thoughts” or “running commentaries” debate that include a few artists and scholars as guests and collaborators in this research phase.

PROGRAMME
16.00-19.45
 Social Choreography and Social Drama, introductory lecture by Ana Vujanović and Bojana Cvejić, Yugoslavia: How Ideas Moved Our Collective Body by Marta Popivoda (selection from video archives, screening with discussion), Sharp Thoughts with Antonia Baehr and Siegmar Zacharias

19.45-20.30 dinner break

20.30-23.00 The Occupy: Non-representationist, Presentist Democracy, lecture by Isabell Lorey, public interview with Ligna collective, Running Commentary by Nicolas Siepen on Shifting/Sitting by Aernout Mik.

Antonia Baehr (photo: Marta Popivoda)

 

OPEN DAY #2: PERFORMANCE AND THE PUBLIC: Social Choreography and Social Drama / Walking Theory at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Paris

“If the body I dance with and the body I work and walk with are one and the same, I must necessarily entertain the suspicion that all of my body’s movements are, to a greater or lesser extent, choreographed”. This would be a concise statement of the social choreography thesis, as Andrew Hewitt develops it in Social Choreography: Ideology as Performance in Dance and Everyday Movement (2005). Social drama, as developed in social anthropology by Victor Turner‒with significant contributions by Arnold van Gennep, Richard Schechner, Roberto Esposito, etc.,‒serves as a rhetorical counterpart to social choreography. Social choreography and social drama then become interpretative tools for exploring the performances in the public and social spheres on the basis of their claim that social order isn’t just reflected but is enacted and rehearsed as an aesthetic order. The two interpretative models focalize bodily gestures and movements, organization of bodies in time and space, mise-en-scène, and dramaturgy of public gatherings and mass social events and thus discuss the functions of “liminality” and “communitas” in shaping social community between the public and the private spheres.

In this phase of the research “Performance and The Public”, Ana Vujanović, Bojana Cvejić and Marta Popivoda examine state performances as well as performances of the public and its citizens informed by two different contexts, socialist Yugoslavia and contemporary Western neoliberal capitalism. On January 7th 2012, they organize an Open Day featuring heterogeneous artifacts of the studied: movements, images, laws, habits, writings in various formats, e.g. “sharp thoughts” or “running commentary” debate that include a few artists and scholars as guests and collaborators in this research phase .

Program:

Introductory lecture by Ana Vujanović and Bojana Cvejić (4pm),  How Ideas Moved Our Collective Body by Marta Popivoda (selection from video archives, screening with discussion) (5.30pm), interview with Dana Yahalomi from Public Movement (6.30pm), “sharp thoughts” debate around the Occupy Movement by Julie Heintz and Vanessa Theodoropoulou (8.15pm), running commentary by Franck Leibovici on “Communitas” / “Raw Footage” by Aernout Mik (9pm)

(dinner break: 7.15 pm ‒ 8.15 pm).

With Bojana Cvejić (TkH), Julie Heintz, Marta Popivoda (TkH), Franck Leibovici,
Vanessa Theodoropoulou, Ana Vujanović (TkH) and Dana Yahalomi (Public Movement)

More information

www.tkh-generator.net
www.leslaboratoires.org
www.howtodothingsbytheory.info

OPEN DAY #1: PERFORMANCE AND THE PUBLIC / Walking Theory at Hetveem theater, Amsterdam

Walking Theory at hetveem theater:
PERFORMANCE AND THE PUBLIC
OPEN DAY #1

 

What is public space, and do we have one, or several, today? Is it only that which we produce, but can’t own? Who governs the public space today? Who are “we” who address the public space as “our” concern? Are we as citizens, especially artists and intellectuals, politically challenged or even dispossessed to the extent that we cannot conceive of the public as the site of action today?

With these questions, Ana Vujanovic, Bojana Cvejic and Marta Popivoda, from the collective Walking Theory (Teorija koja Hoda) from Belgrade, have begun a two-year long theoretical-artistic research about performance and the public, within their project “How to do things by theory” in les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers in Paris. They focus on contemporary forms of social choreography and social drama, “artivism”, biopolitical technologies of self-performance in public, etc. Their research involves examining and fabricating heterogeneous artifacts of artistic and everyday practices: movements, images, laws, habits, discourses… Their perspectives are informed by two different contexts, socialist Yugoslavia and contemporary Western neo-liberal capitalism.

 

On July 1st, 2011, Walking Theory in collaboration with hetveem theater and les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers organize an Open day as part of the first phase of their research, featuring a few artists, scholars and activists as guests and collaborators in discussion, lecture, and video-presentation.

 

Program

16.00 – 18.00
The Word of Host; Bojana Mladenovic
Performance and the Public: Mapping Out  A Research; introduction by Ana, Marta, Bojana
Can We Only Perform the Public Now?; lecture by Ana Vujanovic and Bojana Cvejic 
Yugoslavia: How Ideas Moved Our Collective Body;
Marta Popivoda’s selection from video archives. Screening with Discussion

 

18.00 – 19.00 Dinner

 

19.00 – 22.00

Aernout Mik: Communitas; Running Commentary with Bojana Kunst
Private – Public: Undoing the Binary; sharp thoughts with Igor Dobricic (proponent) and Sigrid Merx (opponent)
A Response; Joe Kelleher
Netherlands: When the State Expels Art from the Public. A Debate

www.tkh-generator.net
www.hetveemtheater.nl
www.leslaboratoires.org
www.howtodothingsbytheory.info

Re-hallucinating the context: Exchange with Deschooling Classroom project

Re-hallucinating the context: Paris – Belgrade
Last phase: Exchange with Deschooling Classroom project; January-February 2011

All the materials produced collectively during this programme, together with creative reports on the visits by the participants are published in the Journal des Laboratoires, April – August 2011 issue, and could be also downloaded here: Re-hallucinating the context: Exchange with Deschooling Classroom

In January and February we organized a valuable exchange between the participants of the research Re-hallucinating the contexts: Paris – Belgrade and the participants of Deschooling Classroom project (working group Cultural policy of the independent scene), organized by TkH, Belgrade and Kontrapunkt, Skopje (www.deschoolingclassroom.tkh-generator.net/).

The participants in the one-week working visits to Belgrade and Paris have been: from Re-hallucinating the context – Nathalie Rias, Delphine Jonas, Sabine Macher, Vanessa Theodoropoulou, and Virginie Bobin (les Laboratoires); from DSC (Cultural policy group) – Marijana Cvetkovic, Marina Laus, Nevena Jankovic, Biljana Dimitrova, Ksenija Cockova, Tamara Busterska, and Dragana Jovovic (TkH), plus Ana Vujanovic and Marta Popivoda, who coordinated the programme of the visits.

Program in Belgrade took place from 24-30 January. It was created together with the participants of DSC from Belgrade, and comprised visits to relevant venues, organizations, and institutions, discussions in each venue with invited guests, as well as internal work. During the week we visited: Interdisciplinary post-graduate studies of the University of Arts, where we discussed about education in culture for a new social and political context with Milena Dragićević-Šešić and Miško Šuvaković; Cultural center Magacin, where we organized a round table about bottom-up approach to cultural policy and self-organization with members of Other Scene (Druga Scena): Station (Marijana Cvetković), TkH platform (Ana Vujanović, Marta Popivoda), Prelom collective: (Dušan Grlja), and Kontekst Gallery (Vida Knežević, Marko Miletić); Cultural Center REX, where Dušica Parezanović and Milica Pekić talked about Collaboration and networking; Center for Cultural Decontamination CZKD, where we invited Borka Pavićević, Aleksandra Jovićević, and Jelena Vesić to elaborate on art and politics at the local scene; and the European Center for Culture and Debate GRAD, where Dejan Ubović, Ljudmila Stratimirović, and Nevena Janković presented this centre and spoke about hybrid cultural institutions. Apart from this, we have had few internal working sessions, as an opportunity to exchange about different cultural policies in Eastern and Western Europe. Motivated by the challenging atmosphere, the participants also decided to make a collaborative work as a result of the exchange – namely, a critical re-writing of the cultural policy document “Belgrade 2020: Cultural capital of Europe”.

Details »