With indelible affirmation, personal expressions of historical and collective memory confront spectres from the past. Marina Gioti delves into one of the most contentious nationalist debates in Greece: the existence of illegal “secret schools” allegedly operating under the auspices of the Greek Orthodox Church during the Turkish Ottoman rule. A recently discovered film produced by the Greek army during the military junta (1967–74) serves as curio ready-made agitprop: proof or perpetuation of a flag-waving myth?
As we await Godard’s new feature, the one-minute Une Catastrophe will suffice as a flash of his prosody, complete with the grunting sounds of a tennis match, a dash of German melodrama and his signature epigrammatic word play. Working in extreme short form, Godard returns to the essayistic style that has come to define his extensive post-Nouvelle Vague body of work. Likewise, Jean-Marie Straub has been steadfast in his filmmaking despite the loss of his filmmaking partner and wife, Danièle Huillet. Le Streghe, femmes entre elles, like last year’s heart-rending Le Genou d’Artemide, is based on Pavese’s Dialogues with Leucò. The luscious emerald forest has since become a republic of women, whose limber physicality grows from the earth, so perfectly ensconced are they within the verdant brush. Nature’s splendour, as Straub has always filmed it, pulses with everlasting energy – a life force at once resolutely present and transcendently eternal. This chimerical intersection for im/mortality limns Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s equally masterful A Letter to Uncle Boonmee, a segment from his multi-platform project Primitive (see also his single-channel installation Phantoms of Nabua, presented as part of Future Projections). Filming in Nabua in northeastern Thailand, site of a bloody 1965 battle between communist farmers and the totalitarian government, Apichatpong employs a roving, floating camera and incantatory omniscient narration to simultaneously evoke the dangerous cycles of violence and repression, and the hope of perpetual rebirth and remembrance.
David Gatten’s Abbreviation for Dead Winter from his Invisible Ink series is a thing of beauty. Passages from Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species are lifted from the page, resulting in residual ink spots and fibres – microscopic worlds unto themselves, with metaphors of migration and distances, both topographic and of the heart.
Andréa Picard
Marina Gioti is an Athens-based filmmaker and curator. Her films include b-alles (05) and The Secret School (09).
Jean-Luc Godard was born in Paris and became a leader in the French Nouvelle Vague. His films include À bout de souffle (60), Vivre sa vie (62), Pierrot le fou (65), Weekend (67), Passion (82), JLG/JLG – autoportrait de d é cembre (95), Notre musique (04) and Une Catastrophe (09).
Jean-Marie Straub was born in Metz, France. His films made in collaboration with his partner, Danièle Huillet, include Not Reconciled (65), Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (68), Moses and Aaron (75), The Death of Empedocles (87), Sicilia! (99), Quei Loro Incontri (06), Europa 2005, 27 Octobre (07) and L’Itinéraire de Jean Bricard (08). Since Huillet’s death in 2006, he has made the films Le Genoud’Artemide (08) and Le Streghe, femmes entre elles (09).
Apitchatpong Weerasethakul was born in Bangkok. He has directed several shorts and award-winningfeatures, including Mysterious Object at Noon (00), Blissfully Yours (02), Tropical Malady (04), Syndromes and a Century (06), TheAnthem (06) and A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (09).
David Gatten lives in Brooklyn. Hisfilms have screened in prestigious international forums and have been included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Art Institute of Chicago.