A
long-term film and video screening program begun in June 2016, the Reconstruction of Story series ends with
Reconstruction of Story 5: Polyphony, the
Imaginary of ‘I’. This final program presents beautiful examples of essay
film narratives that integrate images, texts, and voices (sounds) through a
fictional “I.” Like the melodies of polyphonic music, where diverse melodies
are independently maintained yet at the same time are combined in a whole, the
contrapuntal relationship between images and the rhythms of texts conveyed
through voices leads to the perfection of a poetics of free indirect discourse
in narrative film. From among films where, through fictive characters, present
landscapes come to contain tales of multilayered time, Reconstruction of Story 5 presents works by Marguerite Duras,
Patrick Keiller, Haegue Yang, and Eric Baudelaire.
Marguerite
Duras is remembered as an artist who led new aesthetic trends in various art
genres including literature and cinema and raised important issues in
contemporary film aesthetics. Out of her works, Reconstruction of Story 5 presents four short films that she
created in 1979. Exploring the open, poetic possibilities of texts by overlapping
images of the Avenue des Champs-Élysées in Paris visible through the window
with images of hands from prehistoric cave murals, for example, these shorts
are of the plainest types in the contemporary essay film.
In
addition, the video trilogy by Haegue Yang, who has staged a monodrama adapted
from Duras’s novella The Malady of Death
(La maladie de la mort; 1982),
experiments with the relationship between voices and images in a kind of a travel
epic form. Ambiguous landscape images where the idle thoughts of a drifting
traveler are transmitted through voice-overs reflect the gap between the self
and urban spaces.
Eric Baudelaire’s
works reconstruct in an essay format the hidden stories of beings who have been
severed or have vanished in structures of conventional history and regions. Letters to Max adopts a form where
letters are sent to Maxim Gvinjia, the narrator and the former Foreign Minister
of the legally nonexistent state of Abkhazia. Recounting the 27 years that
Masao Adachi, a radical leftist screenwriter, spent in Lebanon in the 1970s as
a member of the Japanese Red Army, two feature films reconstruct the
protagonist’s journey by using landscape images and archival footages.
Also
screened is the entire oeuvre of Patrick
Keiller, a master of the contemporary essay film who has created works
consisting of contemplative landscape images with the use of subjective camera perspectives
and voice-overs. His magnum opus, the
Robinson trilogy speaks of capitalism and the landscapes of contemporary
British politics, economy, and history through voice-overs in which the unseen,
anonymous narrator reminisces about a series of excursions around London
accompanied by his friend Robinson.
The
masterpieces of the essay film showcased in Reconstruction
of Story 5: Polyphony, the Imaginary of ‘I’ convey the internal rhythms of films
that are generated in the process of turning the artists’ subjective
perspectives themselves into metaphors and reconstruct forgotten, hidden, or lost
tales.
※ Reconstruction of Story5_Brochure
※ Reconstruction of Story5_Screening Schedule
