Film, faced with its memory or an archive, can be a journey to the place of images, to extend its most political, critical or tragic dimension. The programme begins with two pieces by René Vautier, a militant filmmaker whose work of “social agitation” and constant rebellion sets out to “write history in images, immediately!”. Mourir pour des images returns to La Mer et les jours (1958), a film by Alain Kaminker and René Vogel during the filming of which Kaminker disappeared in the sea. In Destruction des archives, Vautier walks through the remains of his films and archives, soaked in petrol and destroyed by a commando allegedly sent in by Le Pen. The second part of the programme interrelates three films that appropriate or reinterpret classic films by Eisenstein, Dreyer and Flaherty, respectively. Pierre Léon uses images from Ivan the Terrible to examine police brutality in Montreuil in 2009, when the young filmmaker Joachim Gatti lost an eye. Ramiro Ledo relates Antonin Artaud’s shots in The Passion of Joan of Arc to the minutes of his expulsion from the Surrealist group. In his new film, Kowalski deconstructs Louisiana Story (commissioned by Standard Oil) and uses images taken from the Internet to denounce the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. According to the filmmaker, it is a piece of “film-graffiti”: “you paint on an existing film, you write on it and you let it go in the historical context”. [Video screening.]
Mourir pour des images, René Vautier, France, 1973, 40 min.; Destruction des archives, René Vautier, France, 1985, 10 min.; À la barbe d’Ivan, Pierre Léon, France, 2010, 10 min.; O proceso de Artaud, Ramiro Ledo, Spain, 2010, 10 min.; The End of the World Begins With One Lie, Lech Kowalski, UK, 2011, 60 min.
