New Visions
This edition of New Visions is marked by the disappearance of Augusto M. Seabra, who in 2007 thought up and created the foundations for a programme that has become pivotal to Doclisboa. The vitality of this section stems from the irreverence and unexpectedness of the programming practices that Augusto passed on to us, and which we can find in one of the first films he programmed here: Compilations, 12 instants d’amour non partagé, by Frank Beauvais.
New Visions is a place where films, forms and filmmakers are placed into a conversation both composed of, and beyond, time. Inspecting filmic gestures that offer us a panoramic view of the contemporary, this programme is grounded in an interest for filmic depth and curiosity, and a desire to find kinships and tensions between differences, proximities and distances offered by its films.
The interrogative invention of Un Âne’s letter to Chantal Akerman’s last film, or the re-envisioning of Albert Lamorisse’s final film in Iran in Lovers’ Wind, could be a way into a programme in which cinema reinvents its measure through the sovereignty of each shot, cut, movement. Such is the gesture of Dominique Auvray, a film editor who is, before everything, enamored of what cinema may elevate to a temporality that can never be captured.
Or the conversation could be through shared affinities or ingredients—think of Courtney Stephens and Mariano Llinás’ use of cinema as a tool to transform intimate processes of mourning into metafictional spaces of thought, through which they gift new purposes to past footage, while opening a space of meaning that only truly materializes through us, the viewers. New purposes, or digging deeper within old uses and traces of intentions, old facts that seem ever more meaningful. Past and present reshape our sense of common time, a major concern of Declan Clarke’s in his creation of a space for a history of friendship and collaboration to emerge, that of Samuel Beckett and Walter Asmus. Another gateway into this year’s programme, resonating with the retrospective Back to the Future, could be under the sign of Beckettian spaces, such as those of Daniel Hui’s Small Hours of the Night.
Repurposing past footage, past meanings, past hierarchies of time and space, reflecting upon what exists beyond and around the brevity in which players inhabit a stage. Andrei Ujică’s latest film goes further on his all-time obsession, and produces a time-capsule that needed a filmic operation to come to life: a USA that, for a weekend in 1965, became invisible while the Beatles arrived in New York City and became the centre of the Earth.
What would a capsule of our present look like? What would be its audiovisual regime? The duo cricri sora ren (Christian von Borries + AI) chose as territory a somewhat critical axis of today—post-communist China, Putin’s Russia, and Berlin—to violently submerge us in our own vertiginous images. Choosing his own video diaries on his desktop, and his town as a viewpoint over history, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, after almost thirty years, brings us a new film. A miraculously intimate piece that somehow encapsulates the voracity of the past and the contradictions of the present. Phil Solomon dives into the loneliest of places, Grand Theft Auto’s Liberty City, and finds a gaze through which to take a mysterious existential flight, programmed here in dialogue with Virgil Vernier’s contemporary fairy tale set in Monaco.
From the past to the future, family seems to be a tangential line that opens up some of the most fascinating abysses. On Robert Frank’s 100th anniversary, revisiting Conversations in Vermont reveals a grace and lucidity that seems even more relevant today. Harmony Korine, in Aggro Dr1ft, places family love at the centre of a violent operatic piece with Shakespearean traces and a formal insolence that challenges any efforts of classification.
On the other end of the spectrum, Pierre Creton and his rural eulogies. A remarkably singular filmic universe unfolds from his work as a filmmaker, a farmer, and a gardener. Creton reconstructs the world around him with a close, delicate, frontal and patient tone, a filmic attitude, a style. Guided by Creton, in New Visions we observe cinema as a field where multiple species cross-pollinate and graze. A place in which multiple forms of imagining the world can grow.
Cíntia Gil, Justin Jaeckle
