Images and Views of Alternative Cinema 2013

Despite the calamitous economic situation in Cyprus, we are presenting the twelfth edition of Images and Views of Alternative Cinema June 26-30, 2013 in Lefkosia, Cyprus. Over the last six months, those of us involved in this experimental film festival have pulled together and have created a fascinating festival of six interrelated programs. I will be hosting an on-line project that will publish information, essays, interviews, guest bloggers, images, etc. relating to IVAC 2013. Join us at Theatro Ena in Lefkosia next week, or stop by View from the Corner for a virtual experience. - Christopher Zimmerman, curator

William Kentridge "10 Drawings for Projection" curated by Pascal Richard

10 Drawings for Projection is an ongoing project started in 1989 by the internationally renowned South African artist William Kentridge. Over the past 14 years, Kentridge has developed film narratives of love, loss, and labor centered on his anti-hero Soho Eckstein and Johannesburg—the city in which he lives—to explore the shifting realities of recent South African history. His unique, handcrafted, stop-motion films come to life through the constant movement between the paper and the camera, between the hand and the eye. Kentridge draws in charcoal, shoots a couple of frames, erases, draws, and shoots again. His lyrical, melancholic films, underscored by multi-layered musical soundtracks, are works of transformation in a material sense as well as reflecting a personal, associative depiction of the intense transformations rippling through South African society. These ten ambiguous palimpsests map a geography of memory and forgetting, of the personal and the political.

"Up To And Beyond Her Limits" curated and presented by Pascal Richard and Christopher Zimmerman

‘Up To And Beyond Her Limits’ juxtaposes Carolee Schneemann’s films with Pipilotti Rist’s single-channel videos. Playing off of a title of one of Schneemann’s performance pieces, this evening—comprising the programs ‘Vulvic Space’ and ‘Licking the Retina’—explores how these radically creative women have challenged patriarchal modes of seeing and have opened alternative spaces and perspectives from which to think about the body, sexuality, and performativity.

"Vulvic Space: The Films of Carolee Schneemann" curated by Christopher Zimmerman

Carolee Schneemann, multi-disciplinary artist and filmmaker, transformed the definition of art, particularly with respect to the discourse on the body, sexuality, and gender. The history of her work is characterized by research into archaic visual traditions, pleasure wrested from suppressive taboos, and the body of the artist in dynamic relationship with the social body.

"Licking the Retina: Pipilotti Rist’s Single-channel Works" curated by Pascal Richard

Pipilotti Rist combines playful and crafted treatments of video as textural material to produce ‘medications for the mind’. Rist's associative video work sucks us in as viewers, bending our viewing habits through her camera work, editing, and treatment of the video grain. She turns images around, cuts them up, focuses on feet, fingers, and skin, and supplies dreamlike soundtracks and hysterical song covers. Rist's films are euphoric and, at the same time, melancholic, bringing about new ways of looking at bodily functions, at sex, at how we gaze, and at how we conceive images. This selection of Rist's early video work presents all the ingredients of her well known recent installations, bringing in colour, expanding our vision, aggressing us with her soundtracks but often leaving us feeling lighter, with a smile on our faces.

"Peter Tscherkassky—Manufractured Tabula Rasa" curated by: Christopher Zimmerman

The films of Austrian avant-garde filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky emerge out of the fabric of the film material itself. Working exclusively with found footage, Tscherkassky’s painstaking hand-printing process is carried out in the darkroom. This two-part program captures the vitality and breadth of a filmmaker engaged in a complete re-engineering and re-animation of the basic materials of film and its history.

"Chris Marker Cinema Against the Grain" curated by: Marie Muracciole

Although known more for his fiction film La Jetée, artist and filmmaker Chris Marker was the most important documentarist and film essayist in the history of moving images. Marker's work uses images and narratives from everyday life in order to address and challenge us as witnesses of our time. Yet, his was not an ordinary voice. His work sought to give a voice to the voiceless, to those on the margins. More than anyone else, Chris Marker connected us visually and aurally to that which is not visible, to that which is silent. His cinema continues to ask so many questions, and this program of his work, inspired by Walter Benjamin's conception of brushing history against the grain, asks: what sorts of relationships do we construct in the present when dealing with the past?

cmzimmermann.blogspot.com/