Issue 4: Summer 2009
Margenes '09
May 25th - 29th 2009
Last year's Márgenes festival, which Experimental Conversations devoted a whole isssue to, brought Spanish experimental cinema and other moving-image related art to Dublin. This year's follow up took the show home. Not only did Márgenes '09 take place in Madrid, but it expanded to include programmes of Spanish, Irish and Portuguese work, all countries considered ‘marginal' in terms of experimental cinema due to their limited output and lack of international reputation in this field.
This year's Márgenes differed from last year's somewhat in presentation. Unlike the Dublin event, which seemed more self-contained, Márgenes '09 was a bringing together of different entities and their representatives. Alexandre Estrela, curator of the Oporto screening space in Lisbon, was responsible for the Portuguese ‘Abstract Video Programme', Velocidade de Luz Variável. Albert Alcoz who organises the Amalgama screenings in Barcelona selected the Spanish programme, Imágenes de Espectros. And Esperanza Collado of Dublin's Experimental Film Club arranged the Irish programme More or Less Annihilated by Saccadic Enchainment by the Sea (with some small input from Your Humble Servant). Furthermore, the whole event was this year affiliated with the larger and longer established VISUAL Festival Audiovisual de Majadahonda. Where the Dublin edition scored higher was in its emphasis on installation and intervention works as well as traditional screenings. The only example of this in Madrid was a witty installation by Collado and Chevalier Vassard in the lobby of the main screening venue inspired by the absence (!) of Beckett's Film (Alan Schneider, 1965) from the Irish programme.
But if the scope of presentation formats narrowed, the broadening of scope in the field of selection for screening opened a fascinating space for the meeting of three nations whose experimental film production is ‘marginal' (even by the standards of experimental film) to non-existent. Of the three, Spain has the richest and most thriving experimental film culture and is most deserving of wider recognition as a viable ‘scene'. In José Val del Omar and Iván Zulueta (to say nothing of Buñuel) it can boast of historical figures to match any of the masters the French or American avant-garde has produced. By choosing a theme as encompassing as the spectral nature of the cinematographic image, Alcoz's busy, colourful programme of contemporary Spanish work allowed for a broad sweep of styles. In as much as one can generalize, documentary and found-footage elements seem to prevail.
Predictably, the stand-out film was Moza de ánimas (2009), the haunting latest work by the phenomenally gifted Oriol Sánchez. This memorably eerie documentary resembles nothing more than an attempt by Bela Tarr to appropriate the techniques of The Blair Witch Project (1999). Victor Iriarte's silent portrait film Cinco películas breves (2007) was also excellent. Easily (perhaps too easily) comparable to Warhol or, even more so, to Garrel, this series of static images of five women imparts a moving impression of emotional distance in physical proximity. Andrés Duque's neatly titled No es la imagen es el objeto (It's Not the Image, It's the Object, 2008) proved very engaging on a different level, as a humourously revealing examination of a once-treasured collection of picture cards. A perennial problem in programming short films is the tendency of very fleeting works to get somewhat lost when screened alongside longer ones. I was certainly intrigued enough by Rámon Ayala's two very brief films La Material (2008) and La Mort de Marat (2008) to want to see them again.
Estrela's Portuguese programme concentrated on highly conceptual video pieces and the work of relatively few artists, although it did not limit itself to recent creations. From Vasco Lucena's perversely hypnotic Disco G Parado, an intensely private black and white VHS record of his work with light on rotating discs, to Pedro Diniz Reis' frankly intolerable structuralist finger-exercises Alphabet (Portuguese) (2005-'07) and GR352-2 (2007), Estrela's selection posits Portuguese experimental filmmaking as a historically unconnected series of isolated gestures. Of all the Márgenes ‘ambassadors', he seemed most categorical in stating that experimental film production did not exist in his country. This left me wondering where the (unmentioned) experimental side of the Portuguese art cinema might fit in. Surely, for example, the great Joao César Monteiro at his most far out (John Wayne's Pelvis [1997], Snow White [2000]) merits a place in this discussion...
And what about us? Any consideration of the Irish programme cannot but be an insider's perspective... And this ‘insider' has little to add to Esperanza Collado's magnificent non-history of the non-history of Irish experimental cinema found on the Márgenes website. Except perhaps a note on its comings and goings. Irish experimental film, such as it is, such as it is represented in Collado's timeline, is at least as much about voyaging and looking beyond nation as it is rooted in it. New York features prominently in the biographies and filmographies of three of the filmmakers screened, three artists of neatly succeeding generations: Vivienne Dick, Donal O'Ceilleachair, Barry Ronan. And the programme's starring absence, Deleuze's candidate for ‘greatest Irish film', Film, was shot in the USA. Donal Foreman's film in the programme, the exquisite Film by the Sea (2005), brings us to the edge of land. Alan Lambert's Film From the Sea (2000) is literally that, a strip of film recovered from the ocean. (And, ‘out of the blue', Lambert has recently given modern cinema a defining statement on global drifting in his feature Ouroboros [2009]). Voyaging and the exchange of ideas is the very essence of Fergus Daly's feature-length documentary Experimental Conversations (2006), the source of this magazine's title, which was screened twice during Márgenes. Ultimately this film is less a history of Irish experimental cinema (‘such as it is...') than the bold construction of a context for such an eventuality based on French experimental cinema, with Artaud's journey to Ireland hovering emblematically over a horizon that could be either past or future. Given all this, from an Irish perspective Márgenes '09 feels like the journey Irish experimental cinema had to take to come in to being, even for a brief instant.
-Maximilian Le Cain