Preface
Eunhee KIM(Assistant curator MMCA Film and Video)
Last year, MMCA Film and Video held the Asian Film and
Video Art Forum, co-organized by independent Asian curators and the
Arsenal-Institute for Film and Video Art, based in Germany, as well as the Berlin
Forum Expanded—MMCA, with the intention to introduce a trend of
experimental video works, ranging from independent documentary, experimental
film, and video art and to suggest new discourses along this line. Now in 2016,
MMCA Film and Video co-organizes Art of the Real —MMCA in collaboration
with Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of that project. MMCA Film and
Video has selected 11 works in cooperation with Rachael Rakes, a programmer at
Film Society of Lincoln Center. All of these works reflect the trends and
issues of non-fiction film and video art, and leave us with interesting
questions as to the direction and spirit of current documentary.
Contemporary non-fiction film appears in many complex forms,
creating dispute as to the identity of documentary itself. The technological transformation of
reproducing images such as the virtual image, hologram, and implementation of
augmented reality apart from the phenomenological study on image, contributes to the formation of a world full
of vague messages, which cannot be discerned from real to fiction. Thus the
recent works mix genre attributes of documentary and fiction, and could be
considered to reflect our fragmented and complicated reality as it is today. In
addition, various experimental non-fiction films concentrating on individual
lives and social relationship already include artist’s video works made for the
purpose of exhibition in a gallery setting, changing the space of documentary
presentation.
The 11 works presented in Art of the Real—MMCA were
each produced in different places and circumstances, and they pose questions about the cinematic
process of documentary in depicting
and constructing reality. Among the program selections, if we were to view the complex politics and
social phenomena revealed in Anna (1972-75), directed by Alberto Grifi
and Massimo Sarchielli and director Brett Story’s The Prison in Twelve
Landscape (2016), we would be able to discover the same questions within
contrasting mode of configuration. The aspect of Italian society of the 1970’s
displayed in Anna, and the raw, rough moments captured by cinéma vérité
style and the scenery of the U.S. held within the controlled form in The
Prison in Twelve Landscape, ask us how to view any moments recorded
by cameras.
Through Art of the Real—MMCA, we invite you to
experience the world of non-fiction films in the age of the hybridity, where
genre classification is a thing of the past.
Preface
Rachael Rakes(Programmer at Large, Film
Society of Lincoln Center)
Initiated in 2014 at the Film
Society of Lincoln Center by me and Director of Programming Dennis Lim, Art
of the Real is an annual nonfiction showcase founded on the most expansive
possible view of documentary film. Each April, for two weeks, the festival features
discoveries from around the world alongside retrospective selections by both
known and unjustly forgotten filmmakers.
The curatorial reach of Art of
the Real extends to the worlds of contemporary art, ethnography and
anthropology, hybrid filmmaking, sound, and avant-garde cinema. Many of the
selected works move between various modes, or evade genre distinctions
altogether. Previous editions of the showcase have featured retrospectives with
Agnes Varda, Bruce Baillie and Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, career-spanning
talks with artists such as Amie Siegel and Elisabeth Subrin, and a thematic series devoted to the
structural modalities of reenactment.
This inaugural collaboration with
MMCA presents eleven selections from Art of the Real’s three editions to
date. Focusing on contemporary works, Art of the Real—MMCA offers
a diverse mix of styles and approaches, which together begin to constellate the
vibrant world of nonfiction moving image production today.
These include science
fiction-inflected works like Adirley Queirós’s White Out, Black In and
Daniel Hui’s Snakeskin, which speculatively and poetically investigate
historical and present traumas; semi-, or perhaps anti-biographical works such
as Poet on a Business Trip by Ju Anqi and Mati Diop’s A Thousand Suns;
unorthodox portraits like Ben Rivers’ idiosyncratic artist study What Means
Something, and Alberto Grifi and Massimo Sarchielli’s 1970s Italian epic Anna
(the lone archival contribution to the series); a raucous, mesmerizing
collaborative drama that slyly re-casts the Algerian War, Narimane Mari’s Bloody
Beans, along with many others that combine visual and conceptual
experimentation with clear, urgent ideas.
We are pleased to bring to MMCA a
sampling of this platform for filmmakers and artists past and present who give
us a wider view of nonfiction cinema.
* Art Of The Real - MMCA Screening Schedule
* Art Of The Real - MMCA Brochure
