In this political fable, which claims to be as much Roberto Rossellini’s Eleven Fioretti of Francis of Assisi as Laurel and Hardy’s slapstick comedy, Pasolini shows the impossible dialogue between the intellectual and the people. His film is thus an acerbic critique of “left intellectuals” that are incapable of grasping popular aspirations.
A film of great formal simplicity, The Hawks and the Sparrows nevertheless remains eminently personal for its author through the themes of Marxism and Catholicism that run through his entire work. Alongside the debutant Ninetto Davoli, Pasolini’s future favourite actor, Totò’s comedic genius shines through here.
The Hawks and the Sparrows is a philosophical comedy that stands out in Pasolini’s filmography.

A short presentation on Pasolini’s cinematographic work will be given by Laura Vichi before the screening.
Laura Vichi has a doctorate in theatre and film studies from the University of Bologna in Italy. She teaches film history and is the director of L’Usine aux Images, an association for education in the visual arts.

Read some reviews on the film:
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-hawks-and-the-sparrows-196
https://cinefilesreviews.com/2017/09/27/the-hawks-and-the-sparrows-1966-movie-review/

See the trailer: https://youtu.be/8riUlf9dAaY

The films presented on this occasion all reveal singular types of relationships between humans and animals. In the course of nocturnal wanderings or waking fantasies, crows, stray dogs, wild boars and seahorses often become the main characters in these fictional or documentary creations.

Through the points of view they choose, these artists question the part of the dream contained in our relationship with the different actors of the living world, with whom we share the same living spaces.

In company of the film makers Benjamin Mouly and Elsa Brès.

Programme :

Patrick Goddard, Whoopsie’s Dream, 2022, 20 min
In English with French subtitles

Patrick Goddard was born in 1984 and lives and works in London. A graduate of Oxford and Goldsmiths Universities, he primarily creates video, sculpture and installation, while also working with photography, painting and drawing. His narrative and politically charged works undermine themselves with self-defeating black comedy as they trace the artist’s clumsy attempts to create personal and political integrity. His work addresses a wide range of topics: ecology, the Anthropocene and the animal, racial politics, gentrification and urbanisation.

Benjamin Mouly, For the birds, la sieste, 2022, 15 min

Man has decided to go and rest in the fresh air. He curls up in a comfortable carpet of grass and a raven invites itself at his side. From dusk to dawn, finding sleep becomes a perilous enterprise for our two guests.

Born in 1987, Benjamin Mouly is a visual artist. After a year of residency at the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid between 2019-2020, he lives and works in Marseille. Benjamin Mouly develops a multidisciplinary practice crossed by the question of the image. Using video, photography, installation or performance, he invests the gap between the bodily and visual experience of an unstable reality and the standardised techniques of its capture.

Andro Eradze, Nightvision, Limited access, 2021, 3 min

Andro Eradze, born in 1993, lives and works in Tbilisi, Georgia. He studied at the Shota Rustaveli Film Academy, as well as at the MFA program of the CCA-T (Center of Contemporary Art Tbilisi). Eradze’s practice explores the potentiality of animism as a method. Photography, installations, experimental film practices and video merge into a project contemplating the fading present, in which the Anthropocene flickers, and everything functions independently of it. Drawing on the legacy of alternative approaches to reality – surrealism and magic realism – his images blur the distinction between the imaginary and the real.

Jean Painlevé, The Seahorse (L’Hippocampe), 1934, 15 min

Jean Painlevé was a French filmmaker and biologist who was born in Paris in 1902 and died on 2 July 1989 in Neuilly-sur-Seine. He studied zoology and biology before devoting himself to cinema. Throughout his career, he developed innovative techniques that allowed him to film underwater and to produce close-up shots. He made more than 200 films, and participated in the democratisation of the animal documentary – his film L’Hippocampe was a real public success. Close to anarchic thinking, he joined the Resistance at the beginning of the war and made Le Vampire (1945), a film dealing with Nazism through the study of a South American bat. The Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris devoted a major retrospective to her in 2022.

Louise Lawler, Birdcalls, 1972–81, audio, 7 min
LeWitt Collection, Chester, Connecticut

For this work, Louise Lawler, an American artist born in 1947, made the names of various well-known male artists – including Vito Acconci, Carl Andre and Donald Judd – sound like bird calls. The humour and wit is counterbalanced by the fact that these white male artists are continually acknowledged as being at the forefront of art, its discourses and histories, with no symmetrical attention given to the significant contributions of women artists and artists of colour in discussions of advanced aesthetics.

Elsa Brès, Aux coups de fusil qu’on entend, 2022, 16 min

Elsa Brès was born in 1985 and lives in Bréau, in the Cévennes. She graduated from Le Fresnoy – studio national d’arts contemporains in 2017 and from the Paris-Belleville School of Architecture in 2012, where she taught architectural and landscape theory. Her films and installations focus on forces of resistance in contemporary landscapes, mixing research, narratives and experimentation. She is currently developing a new film in the rural French region where she lives, which deals with wild boars as allies in the struggle: Les Sanglières.

PROGRAMME:

Van Gogh, Alain Resnais (France, 1947)
Documentary, 18 min

A musa de Van Gogh, Thiago Pedroso et Rafael Frazão (Brazil, 2013)
Fiction, 15 min

Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase,  Joan C. Gratz (USA, 1992)
Animation, 7 min

Vincent 2, le retour,  Xavier Coton (France, 1991)
Fiction, 23 min

Bavure, Donato Sansone (France, 2018)
Animation, 5 min

Glenn Belverio / Sadie Benning / Dana DeGiulio / Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings
Anna Mantzaris / Ridykeulous / Tom Rubnitz & Ann Magnuson

This evening of film screenings invites the Arles public to discover a selection of short films echoing the practice of Nicole Eisenman, whose work is currently on show at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles in the exhibition “Nicole Eisenman and the Moderns. Heads, Kisses, Battles”.

“About Feelings, Laughter and Streets” draws on experimental films produced in the New York of the 1980s and 1990s – films issuing from the same artistic milieu as Eisenman and pursuing similar formal experiments and questions. This screening event is an opportunity to honour the short films made by the Ridykeulous collective founded in 2005 by Eisenman and A.L. Steiner, as well as the TV productions by the American journalist and artist Glenn Belverio, such as The Lesbian Museum (1992).

Through eight films dating from 1984 to 2020, “About Feelings, Laughter and Streets” is a chance to immerse ourselves visually in Eisenman’s artistic biotope, and at the same time to discern the enduring resonances of these experimental New York productions in the practice of younger artists, notably in the sphere of animation.

The majority of the films in English are not subtitled.
Free Entrance – Total running time: 80 min

PROGRAMME :

Ridykeulous (Nicole Eisenman + A.L. Steiner), Times Square S.C.U.M. MANifesto (2011), 7 min
Ridykeulous is a curatorial initiative headed by artists Nicole Eisenman (b. 1965, Verdun) and A.L. Steiner (b. 1967, Miami) and founded in 2005. Ridykeulous mounts exhibitions and events primarily concerned with feminist and queer issues, and uses humorous strategies to critique the art world and culture at large.

Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings, Everything Is Folly In This World That Does Not Give Us Pleasure (2021), 2 min 26
Hannah Quinlan (b. 1991) & Rosie Hastings (b. 1991) are a duo based in London. Working across drawing, film, installation, performance and fresco, their practice examines the behaviours, history, politics, and artefacts of LGBTQIA+ culture in the Western context.  Quinlan and Hastings are committed to exposing nationalism, masculinity, and whiteness within the LGBTQIA+ community and the effects on the community of state-led violence, including policing, gentrification, and austerity.

Glenn Belverio, The Lesbian Museum, 1992, 29 min

Glenn Belverio (b. 1975, New York) is an independent filmmaker living and working in New York City. In 1990 he began producing and co-hosting the popular US cable-TV series The Brenda and Glennda Show, of which The Lesbian Museum forms one episode. The show was designed to popularize the art of drag queens, while addressing the issues of gender and gay politics being debated in American society at that time. At the Lesbian Museum, Brenda and Glennda interview artists at the opening of Christine Martin’s controversial exhibition The Lesbian Museum: 10,000 Years of Penis Envy at Franklin Furnace. For the exhibition, each artist (including Brenda and Glennda) were given a dildo and asked to turn it into a work of art.

Dana DeGiulio, Dr Zoom – Episode 1-8, 2020, 8 min 41 s

Dana DeGiulio (b. 1978, Chicago) is a painter whose project pits action and materiality against image. Her work in video, drawing, installation, painting, writing and teaching is about edges and touch and attention. An itinerant professor of visual art for the last fourteen years, Dana DeGiulio currently teaches at New York University, Columbia University, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She works at home in Brooklyn next to the window.

Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings, Gaby, 2018, 7 min 55

The first part of Gaby includes a montage of found video clips in which active police dance at pride parades to Y.M.C.A. , The Village People’s iconic 1978 song. Over the last decade, similar sequences have been making the headlines of news outlets, triggering an unanimous positive reaction. Often joined by celebrating paraders, the officers are usually caught on mobile phone cameras, and their apparent amicability clashes strongly with today’s alarming rise of police brutality. The film follows with an animatic sequence of a 1977 issue of the gay magazine Christopher Street, extolling, mostly white, male gay communities’ propensity to rejuvenate disregarded neighbourhoods and “save” Manhattan from the “slums”, in what can be understood as early testimonies of a queer history of gentrification in New York.

Sadie Benning, If Every Girl Had a Diary, 1990, 8 min

Sadie Benning (b. 1973, Madison) is a self-taught American filmmaker and artist. Known for their intimate films addressing issues of homosexuality, identity and desire, they enjoyed some success on the 1990s American art scene. They remain one of the most famous representatives of the New York underground culture of that epoch.

Tom Rubnitz and Ann Magnuson,Made for TV, 1984, 15 min

Thomas Rubnitz (1956, Chicago – 1992, New York) is an artist particularly known for the videos he made during the years 1980– 1990. Originally from Chicago, he spent most of his life in New York’s East Village, a centre of American gay and queer culture. This emblematic figure of the 1980s New York underground scene leaves behind an essential, political, joyful and insolent body of work. Tom Rubnitz died of an AIDS-related illness in 1992.

Anna Mantzaris, ENOUGH, 2017, 2 min 22 s

Swedish animation director and filmmaker Anna Mantzaris (b.1986, Stockholm) holds an MA in Animation from the Royal College of Art in London. Her films have won over 80 international awards, including the European Animation Award, the Vimeo Award for Best of the Year, the Walt Disney Award and the Audience Award at the Ottawa International Animation Festival. She teaches on an occasional basis and has been a guest lecturer at the Royal College of Art in London, the Stockholm University of the Arts and the National Film & Television School in England.

Original version, French subtitles, 1h20 min
Teaser: https://youtu.be/MaSL5GxDl90

Synopsis

Until 1989, the village of Dafen in the city of Shenzhen, China was little more than a hamlet. It now has a population of 10,000, including hundreds of peasants-turned oil painters. In the many studios, and even in the alleyways, Dafen’s painters turn out thousands of replicas of world-famous Western paintings. Nobody thinks anything of an order for 200 Van Goghs. To meet their deadlines, painters sleep on the floor between clotheslines strung with masterpieces. In 2015, the turnover in painting sales was over $65 million.

As part of the exhibition La Haute Note Jaune, which features several paintings by German artist Albert Oehlen,
we are organising a screening of the film The Painter made in 2021 by the artist and Oliver Hirschbiegel, a docu-drama starring Ben Becker and the voice of Charlotte Rampling.

(!) The screening will take place in the LUMA Arles auditorium, located in the Tower on level 1.

Free, online reservation recommended HERE
Original version: German – English subtitles

about the film
Fiction, documentary, filmed performance? Actor Ben Becker plays Albert Oehlen, a painter creating a painting. The film crosses formal boundaries and questions the meaning of the creative process and the struggle for authenticity at different levels. As the painter himself says, ‘Art must show its internal process of creation, like a stripped-down, totally visible mechanism, and must not be the artist’s field of sensitive expression’. /Jean-Charles Vergne

about the artist Albert Oehlen
Born 1954 in Krefeld, Germany; lives in Gais, Switzerland
Albert Oehlen’s work, linked to neo-Expressionism, draws on conceptual gestures and logic. It is rooted in the punk movement and German left-wing ideology of the 1970s; the artist constantly questions the authoritarian and dominant nature of painting, attempting to free it from its historical obligations and references. The result is a body of experimental work that grapples with the many ideological and formal crises of the contemporary age.

Genre: Biopic
Year: 2015
Country of origin: France
Running time: 1 h 47 min
Director: Fabrice Maze
Production: Aube & Oona Elléouet Breton – Seven Doc

Synopsis: Claude Cahun (Lucie Schwob) is an independent woman, emancipated, an income earner, a non-militant homosexual, a ‘wandering writer’, a versatile artist, a revolutionary, an anti-fascist, an individualist, an atypical surrealist, in a word, unclassifiable. Out of all conformism, out of a perpetual concern for differentiation and a ‘mania for the exceptional’, she produced an innovative and disconcerting body of photographic work in which she portrayed herself with the help of her partner, Marcel Moore (Suzanne Malherbe), with whom she shared her entire life. A mythical couple, often overshadowed, despite their many collective works. ‘All creation is self-creation’, wrote Claude Cahun, rebelling against any form of identification and for whom ‘labels are detestable’. Her desire was ‘to travel only on the bow of oneself’.

+ about artists

I am your life’s work’ wrote Claude Cahun (Lucie Schwob) to her partner Marcel Moore (Suzanne Malherbe) in 1914. Sisters by marriage and lovers since adolescence, the two artists produced a body of photographic and literary work for almost forty years, always signed with Cahun’s name alone. Originally from Nantes, and close to the Surrealist community in Paris in the 1920s, they forged a highly personal path that questioned both artistic and sexual identity. Their cooperation, based on complementary skills, was expressed as much in publishing as in experimental theatre during the inter-war period. They joined the Resistance on the island of Jersey during the Occupation, and their political commitment bears witness to a relationship that was always marked by collective anonymity. (source here)

The exhibition ‘La Haute Note Jaune’ presents 5 photographs by Claude Cahun.
The Foundation would like to thank Jersey Heritage Collections for lending the works.

Essor / Un rêve de vol (Soaring / A dream of flight) and Unselfie… explore the origins of leisure culture, the commodification of ‘free’ time, the democratisation of photography, and the key role that the camera once played in the creation and propagation of collective identity.

Discover the two slideshows online (10m40s and 4m50s)
(Unselfie… starts at the end of Essor / Un rêve de vol (Soaring / A dream of flight))

Originally created as part of gethan&myles’ exhibition for Invisible Archives, Manifesta 13, these two slideshows were drawn from an archive of over 8 000 photos taken between 1897 and 1940. These photos are preserved in the Archives Municipales de Marseille and the private archives of the ‘Excursionnistes Marseillais – Association pour l’essor Provençal’.

Slogans are taken from 1910s-1940s advertising found in the Excursionnistes’ quarterly bulletins – and from the ‘proverbes des Excurs’ featured in the margins of these pamphlets. The font used is Sainte-Baume: created by Formes Vives and based on the Art Deco sign found above the Excurs’ former HQ, 33 allée Gambetta, Marseille.

Enjoy your flight!

gethan&myles

Following a chance encounter on a soggy south-London zip-line in 2008, Gethan Dick (Irish) and Myles Quin (Irish-ish), have spent the intervening period working together – and with others. From these encounters a varied, many-headed project has been spawned: a body of work built in response to the real world, and in an unfailing relationship to concrete experiences, lived and shared with others. Participation and collaboration are at the heart of their approach – and of the works resulting from it. Their projects are a reflection of territories traversed and people met. Whether intervening on landscapes or interacting with people’s behaviours, they strive to build bridges between art and life – arousing questions and emotions; inviting the public to ‘re-see’ and reassess. Through their installations, films, sculptures and books, gethan&myles celebrate the capacity of art to enrich our understanding of – and feeling for – the real.

Their work is supported by several international institutions, such as: ADIAF, CAIRN, DRAC (PACA and Hauts-de-France), Fotokino, Frac PACA, Louvre-Lens, ministère de la Culture, MUCEM and musée Gassendi (France); Barbican, British Library, ICA, RCA, Tate Modern, Wellcome Trust (Great Britain); Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Germany); Manifesta (Netherlands); eyebeam (USA); Havana Biennial (Cuba). gethan&myles are represented by Double V Gallery (Marseille).

On 15 July, the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles will be hosting the event Long Story Short. Long Story Short is a selection of short films from Georgia, dating back to the 1930’s until today. The selection covers film made within early Soviet times, during mid-Soviet times and shortly after the collapse, as well as pictures the contemporary rural Georgia and its social – political position.

This screening evening offers a rare opportunity to discover a too little displayed Georgian cinema, while its diversity shows a remarkable dynamism

This anthology is offered by Elene Abashidze (b.1987), a freelance curator, writer and editor living and working in Tbilisi, Georgia. After graduating from MFA Curating Contemporary Art, Goldsmiths in 2014, she returned to Georgia and since then works in public and commercial sectors of exhibition making. She is a co-founder and co-editor of a bilingual critical magazine Danarti (www.danarti.org).

These are silent films or with English subtitles.

Film selection in order:

Buba by Nutsa Gogoberidze, 1930 (39 min)
Kolga by Michael Kobakhidze 1967 (20 min)
Temo by Lasha Tskvitinidze, 2018 (30 min)
Xitana by Sophio Medoidze, 2018 (6 min)

Biographies:

Nutsa Gogoberidze – (b. 1902 – d. 1966) was the first female film director in Georgia. Her film Buba belongs is of propaganda nature. It was held at a Russian film archive for decades and was reclaimed by Georgia as their cultural heritage only in 2016.

 Michael Kobakhidze – (b. 1939) is a Georgian screenwriter, film director, actor and composer. A Retrospective of his work was held at the 1996 Venice Film Festival.

 Lasha Tskvitinidze – (b.1988) is a young screenwriter and film-director from Georgia. Author of an award winning I’m Beso (2014). Temo is his most recent work, yet to be premiered in 2019.

Sophio Medoidze is artist and writer living in London. She studied fine art at Goldsmiths College (MFA) and Photography at the London College of Communication (MA). Recent exhibitions include Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland, Sixty-eight Institute Copenhagen DK, as well as screenings at the B-movie cinema, Hamburg, Whitechapel Gallery, London and Avanca film festival, Portugal.

 And in September 2019 (date to be confirmed later) :

The Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles will show the emblematic film My Grandmother (1929, 80 min) by the actor and film director Kote Mikaberidze (1861-1973). He worked on with artist Irakli Gamrekeli, Kadjeti and other. His work has been shown throughout various festivals, institutions and museums of former USSR and Europe.

Photo : My Grandmother, 1929, by Kote Mikaberidze; Courtesy of National Archives of Georgia.

English version, French subtitles
1h30
Film based on Jacqueline B. Weld biography, The Wayward Guggenheim (1986)
Director: Lisa Immordino Vreeland
Executive producers: Maja Hoffmann, Josh Braun, Bob Benton
Producers: Stanley Buchthal, David Koh, Dan Braun, Jan NorthRup (co-producer).
Submarine Entertainment