Programme 4

The final session of the programme welcomes Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Director of the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University. In their own way, Castaing-Taylor's films —working with Verena Paravel or Ilia Barbash— have had a reception similar to that of direct cinema. It has been said that the films of the 1960s record reality from “too” close, that they abolish the distance between the one who represents and what is being represented, and that this proximity is obscene, even abject —it is often said that it is a “visceral” cinema and, on occasion, these pieces are accused of being voyeuristic or have even been censored as pornographic—.

These types of judgements reveal the fascination and discomfort —the aura and shock— characteristic of a cinema that penetrates areas of reality that had not been represented until then. Starting with the screening of some of his Sheep Rushes, a series of 8 non-narrative studies stemming from the preparation of Sweetgrass —2009—, Castaing-Taylor will discuss with Xavier Nueno, the programme curator, some of the themes, forms, intuitions, and practices of his work, as well as the Sensory Etnography Lab’s activity.

Proponents of direct cinema were bothered by the comparison of their gaze to that of a fly. They felt that flies viewed reality with apathy and disinterest. Perhaps they never considered how flies really see.

Xavier Nueno