Programmed by Amy Kazymerchyk and Sarah Todd
Famed writer and critic Susan Sontag’s third film and only documentary obliquely witnesses the final days of the 1973 Yom Kippur War in Israel. The film is a collage of observational fragments showing that something happened, but not why it happened, a strategy illustrating her conviction that “to interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world.” Sontag resisted the label documentary, instead suggesting literary analogues such as “the poem, the essay and the lamentation” to describe the film’s dialectical structure. Roberto Rossellini said she uses “the Arab-Israel War as a metaphor for the human condition.” Sontag continued to explore the metaphor of suffering in her writing (Illness as Metaphor, Regarding the Pain of Others). France 1974. Dir: Susan Sontag. 87 min. 16mm
Programmed by Michèle Smith
The Bruce Lacey Experience | Great Britain 2012. Dirs: Jeremy Deller, Nick Abrahams. 67 min.
So Many Ways to Hurt You (The Life and Times of Adrian Street) | Great Britain 2010. Dir: Jeremy Deller. 28 min.
Our Hobby is Depeche Mode | Great Britain 2008. Dirs: Jeremy Deller, Nick Abrahams. 73 min.
Programmed by Michèle Smith,
Aurelian Froment in attendance
To launch its 2014 season, DIM Cinema is hosting an evening of videos by the acclaimed French artist Aurélien Froment, in advance of his first Canadian solo exhibition. Froment often uses theatrical devices and the format of instructional films to draw the audience in as participants in these cleverly-crafted investigations into the transmission of ideas. Some of the videos take a specific object or practice as subject matter — a jellyfish, a boating knot, a yoga pose — and examine it through language, revealing the elusive relationship between images and words. Others follow the shifts in perspective witnessed by forgotten historical objects as their uses and meanings change over time from those envisioned by their designers. And still others are concerned with the mental processes involved in the construction of narrative and memory.
The Kidnapper’s Opera is a video-artwork based on a true story: On December 21, 1990, several young men, some of them teenagers, kidnapped the daughter of Canadian billionaire Jimmy Pattison in Vancouver. After receiving a $200,000 first payment on their ransom demands, the kidnappers decided to go on a shopping spree in a rented limousine; they were caught later that day conspicuously spending large amounts of cash at local shopping malls. Inspired by a quotation from Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera – “What is the robbery of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?” – the film considers how inequality is psychologically experienced in our society. The explanation for the behaviour of the teenagers focuses on the false desires of fortune and personal grandeur created by advertising, the media, and a sense of lack perpetuated by globalization. Structured like a play, each scene of The Kidnapper’s Opera is set and shot uniquely. Dan Starling, 2013, Colour, HDCAM, 90mins, Canada.
Dan Starling is a visual artist from Vancouver who works in a variety of mediums (drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, performance). Starling studied at Emily Carr University in Vancouver and Städelschule in Frankfurt and teaches at Emily Carr University.
Programmed by Michèle Smith
A falcon equipped with a tiny camera hovers over the desert like a living drone. Auguries are taken from the flight of starlings above the roofs of the Vatican. At ground level, a magician-mime uses conjuring tricks to interpret abstract art, shepherds watch over Glenn Gould practising a Chopin étude, and a prisoner secretly records his daily life on a smuggled phone in exchange for short video clips of the world outside. This month we’re mapping the conceptual terrain crossed by French artists in the past decade, from art and aesthetics to politics, philosophy, race, and citizenship. An irresistible cinematic amuse-bouche and digéstif will be served by Laure Prouvost, whose recent video installation Wantee, about the artistic friendship between her late (entirely fictional) grandfather and the Dadaist Kurt Schwitters, earned her a nomination for this year’s Turner Prize — winner to be announced in early December (Go Laure!).
PROGRAM
Owt | Laure Prouvost/Great Britain 2007. 3 mins.
Abstract Telling | Olivier Dollinger/France 2010. 16 mins.
Le Berger | Benoît Maire/France 2011. 15 mins.
Temps Mort | Mohamed Bourouissa/ France 2009. 18 mins.
Pruitt Igoe Falls | Cyprien Gaillard/France 2009. 7 mins.
Les Oiseaux | Laurent Grasso/ France 2008. 9 mins.
A Study of the Nature of Things | Laurent Montaron/France 2011. 12 mins.
On Air | Laurent Grasso/ France 2009. 9 mins.
Wantee | Laure Prouvost/Great Britain 2013. 15 mins.
Image: On Air (still), 2009. Courtesy Galerie Valentin, Paris, and Sean Kelly Gallery, New York © Laurent Grasso / ADAGP, Paris, 2013.