Venice film festival
Nov. 18th, 2007 11:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusTrawling through the Venice art biennale this weekend -- the Giardini on Saturday, the "collateral events" in palazzi throughout the city on Sunday, the Arsenale Monday -- I've been watching a lot of film. And it occurs to me that the kind of film you see at an art biennial is to commercial narrative cinema as poetry is to prose. This "poetic cinema" tends to be shorter, quieter and more subtle and lyrical than its prosaic sister art, to use its medium more inventively and self-reflexively, to meditate rather than narrate.
Whereas Italian television seems to drag you, within seconds, to a place where greed, sloth, stupidity and ugliness dominate, the slow AV stuff in the biennale almost always rewards your attention with freshness, emotion, glimses of alternative worlds, beauty, oddness, even comedy.
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Some of the highlights: Willie Doherty, one of two video artists showing in the Irish pavilion. Doherty has a haunting film in which we're walking along a damp country lane while a voice-over recounts memories of massacres during the Troubles, and meanwhile, poised at the road's vanishing point, never getting any closer, is a figure we gradually understand to be a ghost. There are ghosts, too, in the Taiwanese show Atopia, in a palazzio near St Mark's Square. Here they're showing (in a room with the total blackout and silence it requires, but art video so rarely gets) a Tsai Ming-Liang film set in a deserted fleapit cinema. The film visualizes long-dead family members eating durian fruits as they watch films we never see. At the end, the characters fade into the seats in the longest, most poignant dissolve ever.
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Gerard Byrne, the other artist in the Irish pavilion, has restaged -- in impeccable mid-century modern locations -- a series of conversations about the future by 20th century science fiction writers. They expect to see a man on the moon by 1970, working moon bases by 1975, humans on Mars by 1980, and so on. Byrne has captured the writers' pipe-smoking buffoonery very well, but ultimately we -- the future -- are the buffoons for failing to realize a tenth of this stuff. Byrne's architecture rhymed nicely with Andreas Fogarasi's Hungarian pavilion, dedicated to videos of Iron Curtain Modernist architecture.
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The best of the national pavilions in the Giardini was France; Sophie Calle has run a gamut of Queneau-style Style Exercises on a brush-off email she received from a self-centred womaniser. We spent ages in the video room, where about fifty of Calle's female friends make a performance, acting out the mail in inventive ways. (It didn't hurt that this was one of the few adequately-heated spaces in the Giardini on a bitterly cold day).
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Other film highlights: the Russian pavilion had an odd take on the Rape of the Sabines, with nubiles being put to the sword while CG animations depicted various transport disasters in the background. There was a nice Tabaimo piece, an animation of a doll's house being assembled by a sadist who soon scratches it to shreds. There were some misty waterfalls and geysers in one of the palazzi whose nationality I forget for the moment. Oh, and Iceland had a domestically-framed interview with an elderly conceptual artist, too busy remembering Walter Benjamin to bite into the croissants and cakes spread out before him.
We'll see more "poetry cinema" today at the Portugese and Singapore pavilions, and throughout the Arsenale. But where better to see this stuff than in a city whose prosaic narrative -- in the form of motorized traffic -- is completely absent, and instead, everywhere, there are just people, palazzi, and poetry?
Whereas Italian television seems to drag you, within seconds, to a place where greed, sloth, stupidity and ugliness dominate, the slow AV stuff in the biennale almost always rewards your attention with freshness, emotion, glimses of alternative worlds, beauty, oddness, even comedy.
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Some of the highlights: Willie Doherty, one of two video artists showing in the Irish pavilion. Doherty has a haunting film in which we're walking along a damp country lane while a voice-over recounts memories of massacres during the Troubles, and meanwhile, poised at the road's vanishing point, never getting any closer, is a figure we gradually understand to be a ghost. There are ghosts, too, in the Taiwanese show Atopia, in a palazzio near St Mark's Square. Here they're showing (in a room with the total blackout and silence it requires, but art video so rarely gets) a Tsai Ming-Liang film set in a deserted fleapit cinema. The film visualizes long-dead family members eating durian fruits as they watch films we never see. At the end, the characters fade into the seats in the longest, most poignant dissolve ever.
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Gerard Byrne, the other artist in the Irish pavilion, has restaged -- in impeccable mid-century modern locations -- a series of conversations about the future by 20th century science fiction writers. They expect to see a man on the moon by 1970, working moon bases by 1975, humans on Mars by 1980, and so on. Byrne has captured the writers' pipe-smoking buffoonery very well, but ultimately we -- the future -- are the buffoons for failing to realize a tenth of this stuff. Byrne's architecture rhymed nicely with Andreas Fogarasi's Hungarian pavilion, dedicated to videos of Iron Curtain Modernist architecture.
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The best of the national pavilions in the Giardini was France; Sophie Calle has run a gamut of Queneau-style Style Exercises on a brush-off email she received from a self-centred womaniser. We spent ages in the video room, where about fifty of Calle's female friends make a performance, acting out the mail in inventive ways. (It didn't hurt that this was one of the few adequately-heated spaces in the Giardini on a bitterly cold day).
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Other film highlights: the Russian pavilion had an odd take on the Rape of the Sabines, with nubiles being put to the sword while CG animations depicted various transport disasters in the background. There was a nice Tabaimo piece, an animation of a doll's house being assembled by a sadist who soon scratches it to shreds. There were some misty waterfalls and geysers in one of the palazzi whose nationality I forget for the moment. Oh, and Iceland had a domestically-framed interview with an elderly conceptual artist, too busy remembering Walter Benjamin to bite into the croissants and cakes spread out before him.
We'll see more "poetry cinema" today at the Portugese and Singapore pavilions, and throughout the Arsenale. But where better to see this stuff than in a city whose prosaic narrative -- in the form of motorized traffic -- is completely absent, and instead, everywhere, there are just people, palazzi, and poetry?