Film programme

We are screening this film programme as part of the actions which make up the intervention at the Museo Jorge Oteiza.

Continuing with the same reflections which drive the most manifestly spatial moments of the proposal, with this series of films we aim to trace different hypotheses on the filmic experience resulting from sensitive investigation of the network of connections between screen and window, and support and light. Under this premise, each film presents us with a hypothesis. This relates different states, materials or actions linked to the luminous instant that projection and the window activate. Far from establishing a code, these concepts could configure a structure in which to begin to support a tautological exploration of our conventions and uses of the screen and the window. We learn to inhabit
the projection with the grounding of the window. We project on the window the sensitive education we have developed on the screen. Although the circumstances of projection and the windows vary (we are not talking about an ideal scheme), our sensitive training activates certain elements or perceptual structures in the absence of their intrinsic factors. In general terms, we recognise three components in the use of the window implicit in the practice of projection: the cut (outline of a field), the insurmountable threshold (a boundary which, embodied in the support, is not designed to be crossed but sustains the coexistence of two divided spaces) and the irruption of waves in a stable environment (vectors, for example, of light, sound or wind). The interplay of these three components heightens the tensions between the contained and the expansive, between the interior and the exterior or between the surface and depth. In particular terms, each window and each screen motivate specific factors. And so it is with the programme.

The order of the films can be seen to trace a sequence of concrete notions, part of a path to walk without interruption. First of all, the focus, in search of a figure, squinting towards that luminous moment we were talking about and depositing our attention through it. We leave that other space in which we find ourselves, a void nuanced in shadow, where our body is immersed and sustained by the conditions of the environment. While our eye receives the light reflected by the flat support, the rigid fabric on which to pour the two-dimensional image has the ability to transform the space in which we find ourselves. A place shaped by the concentrated light and by its absence outside the limit established by the support. Like the window (we are talking about the window that is no longer door), the screen actualises a threshold which our bodies, in principle, do not cross. We see the wind, but it does not cross the threshold. This is the interface of the luminous instant. Sunlight reflecting off the landscape, the glare of the projector reflecting off the screen: both light sources have the potential to dazzle, the glare could imprint black or blue spots on our retinas. That is why we will always choose to see the reflection, being at most
the only thing that we can see (the reflection on things), which will produce softer retinal persistences.

We find that the films implicitly contain, within themselves and between each other, concepts which could be antagonistic, such as, for example, the most obvious one, light and darkness. But we also seek, through them, other analogous figures, such as the window and the screen. This leads us, firstly, to understand certain mechanisms of vision and, secondly, to reflect on the conventions of the filmic situation on the basis of these observations of everyday life.

Bruno Delgado Ramo, Paula Guerrero

Focus I
Jenny Okun
United Kingdom, 1977, 3 min, 16mm, colour, silent

A Proposal to Project in 4:3
Viktoria Schmid
Austria, 2016, 2 min, 16mm, colour, silent

Windmill II
Chris Welsby
United Kingdom, 1972, 8 min, 16mm, colour, silent

Room Window Sea Sky
Peter Todd
United Kingdom, 2014, 3 min, 16mm, colour, silent

Arequipa
Barbara Hammer
USA, 1981, 12 min, 16mm, colour, silent

Window
Stan Brakhage
USA, 1976, 10 min, super-8, colour, silent

Eye Eclipse + 3 Suns + Solar, the blindman eating a papaya + Heat Ray
João Maria Gusmao, Pedro Paiva Portugal, 2007-2011, 9 min, 16mm, colour, silent