Issue 7: Summer 2011
Editorial: Thin LInes
'The Thin Line Between Documentary and Fiction' is the title of a three-part essay by David Brancaleone, the first section of which appears in this issue of Experimental Conversations. It is also the 'thin line' along which British filmmaker Martin Radich constructs his cinematic universe, as outlined in Laurence Boyce's overview of his work. A discussion of documentary strategies is crucial to Tony McKibbin's analysis of Fergus Daly and Katherine Waugh's essay film The Art of Time, which moves and thinks freely across cinema, philosophy and art in general in pursuit of its subject. The films of artists and writers whose practices embrace the medium as only one component in a broader creative project feature in both Claire Healy's reflections on the 'Wishful Thinking' artists' 16mm film programme and Santiago Rubín de Celis' in-depth look at some treasures of the splendid Belgian avant-garde cinema of the '20s and '30s.
In short, in this edition of Experimental Conversations 'lines' are 'thin' not only between documentary and fiction, between cinema and gallery, but also between film and life. The moving image is free to explore and dialogue with the world and, in so doing, adopt whatever form best suits its circumstances.
In the history of cinema, no one has lived and worked and come to exemplify this freedom more than Agnes Varda. Carrying with her the moment of the Nouvelle Vague in which documentary and fiction techniques collapsed in on one another, her more than five decades of unwaveringly personal filmmaking have encompassed fiction, documentary and installation as all part of the same surging billow of creativity.
This March, Agnes Varda visited Cork City, the hometown of Experimental Conversations, as guest of the French Film Festival. The Festival hosted a fine retrospective of her work, which took place alongside an exhibition at the Wandesford Quay Gallery.
The seventh issue of Experimental Conversations is dedicated to this event, and pays tribute the French Film Festival for bringing it about.
-Maximilian Le Cain