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PRESENT SCREENINGS


Criss - Cross in January 26-29
at Maison du Danemark, Paris

and in February 1- March 5
at Västerås Konstmuseum, Västerås


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Selectors:
Thierry Jousse, Åsa Nacking,
Cristina Ricupero, Mats Stjernstedt
and Cilla Werning


CROSSING FRONTIERS

The world of images today is somewhat paradoxical, or even self-contradictory. On one side, if one considers commissions and administrative rules, disciplines and media seem more stratified than ever before and specialists of all kinds appear to have acquired excessive power to legislate over the complexity of the real. On the other, images seem usually governed by a general regime of elusiveness, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, and the frontiers between the different disciplines are constantly being blurred and transgressed, which inevitably causes a certain amount of confusion. In between these two extremes, it can be observed that many artists have gone over to video and cinema. Some of them, such as Eija-Liisa Ahtila and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, have their works shown in film festivals, while, on the other hand, filmmakers like Chantal Akerman, David Lynch, Claire Denis and Atom Egoyan are invited to take part in exhibitions of contemporary art. The main characteristic of the five programmes focusing on the Nordic and Baltic region put together by NIFCA is that they take on board this constant interplay between disciplines, these structural mutations in art and cinema. At the same time, they try to reorganise different kinds of works within formal and thematic categories that transcend genres and formats.

The main goal is to organise, within the same programme, the coexistence of highly diverse objects, i.e., short fiction films, documentaries and artist’s videos. This is anything but self-evident and raises a number of crucial questions: how does one articulate within a single space works taken from multiple sources? How does one go about mixing the images from different horizons without just making the kind of audiovisual hotchpotch that usually means zero thought content? What are the criteria one should use to underpin mixed, cross-disciplinary programmes?

Rather than sticking to rigid principles or giving in to overly ingrained ways of thinking, the guiding line in this process was to start with the works themselves and, in an almost musical sense, to compose arrangements, to trace lines between different objects, wagering that the friction between forms would open up meaning. A number of key works, which are at the heart of this problematic of mixing, helped us effect this shifting of lines. One of them is The Five Obstructions, a film by Jørgen Leth and Lars von Trier. A playful and highly personal reflection on cinema which freely transgresses the boundaries between fiction and documentary, art and movies, the camera’s real-life capture and animation, and between periods, this film quite naturally touches on this contemporary impurity of images which interests us so much here. This work would be equally at home in a cinema and an exhibition of contemporary art, for its images make light of pre-existing categories and set about rearticulating them. To name but a few of the works selected, the stylistically very diverse proposals include a remarkable political documentary by the artist Petra Bauer; Der Fall Joseph, the films of the Estonian Marko Raat – an amusing and very personal essay, For Aesthetic Reasons, and a short fiction film, Suite for Two, a kind of combination between Sophie Calle and Alfred Hitchcock; the works of Pia Rönicke, which connect references to architecture, cinema and art; the astonishing Meet you in Finland Angel by Veli Gräno, a documentary portrait with tinges of fiction or even fantasy; and Jens Jonsson’s brilliant short fiction, Headway, which uses a set-up that is very close to contemporary art. All of them contribute to this shifting of frontiers. Indeed, this observation could easily be extended to the great majority of pieces shown here, for traditional formal definitions are pushed to the limits by these works from multiple horizons.

Having made our selection, we decided to divide the works into five genre-mixing thematic programmes. The first, “Family/Domestic,” is about the importance of the private, personal sphere as a source of images of all kinds. The second, “Identity/Portrait,” considers the question of the representation of the body and the individual’s shifting position in society. The third, “Social/Political” focuses on the present and past state of the world, and the way filmmakers, artists and documentary makers respond to its chaos. The fourth, “Urban Situation/Utopian Modernism,” questions the notions of space, architecture, design and, more generally, environment. The fifth, “Film on Film,” presents the different ways of thinking about images and their history, vertiginously exploring the limits of true and false. All reflect our actual experience of images and transgress the customary frontiers, not to create new ones but to capture the complexity and movement of a universe where trans-border exchanges have become the defining principle.

PLEASE HAVE A LOOK AT THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION:


Criss - Cross film descriptions
Criss - Cross information for interested venues
Criss - Cross press information


For further information please contact: information@nifca.org