Toute la mémoire du monde

The Punto de Vista Festival is once more collaborating with the Navarra Film Library with a new cycle of Foco Punto de Vista, with which the festival reaches out to the public beyond the days of the festival and programmes a session devoted to avant-garde documentary film on the last Thursday of each month.

How do we reach the present? How has non-fiction film evolved until the present day? What are the similarities between writers of different generations? This cycle proposes a game: trace connections, some of which are explicit whilst others are highly unlikely, some openly inherited whilst others are suggested later, to establish an inter-generational dialogue among the great names in History and the filmmakers that make film language move into the present. Essential names from documentary film, such as Chris Marker, Maya Deren, Jean Vigo or Agnès Varda will coexist with filmmakers of the present to generate a series of possible themed and aesthetic correlations between directors of all times.

This first programme is opened with The Train Rolls On by Chris Marker, a heartfelt tribute to the Soviet filmmaker, Alexandr Medvedkine, but also to his way of understanding film, a philosophy that became what is probably the most beautiful and utopian project ever: the film-train. Alain Resnais once more relies on the complicity of Chris Marker in All the World's Memory, a unique film on the National Library in Paris. Isaki Lacuesta adopts the Markeriano style to make his essay The Marker Variations, his personal tribute to the French traveller. Medvedkine, Marker, Resnais and Lacuesta are all are united by their love of film and their admiration for coming and going.

Finally, an invitation: it is not by chance that The Train Rolls On opens this new season of Punto de Vista at the Navarra Film Library. As the new Artistic Director of Punto de Vista, Garbiñe Ortega, points out, “we want the spirit of this film to guide us in these sessions and those that will be held during the festival next March, paving the way for what is unthinkable, inspired by the certainty that the imagination is not the enemy of reality in the same way that art is not the enemy of life. So, let’s start. As Marker says: “First, the look…”.

FIRST FOCO PUNTO DE VISTA SESSION

Thursday 28th September. 8pm. Navarra Film Library

All the World's Memory (Toute la mémoire du monde, France, 1957)

• Director: Alain Resnais
• Intervention by: Jacques Dumesnil.
• Language: O.V. in French with Spanish subtitles
• Duration: 21 minutes

Resnais analyses the French National Library in twenty-one minutes. With the help of a hyperactive camera, he skilfully describes the place.

The Train Rolls On (Le train en marche, France, 1973)

• Director: Chris Marker
• Intervention by: Aleksandr Medvedkin, François Périer.
• Language: O.V. in French with Spanish subtitles
• Duration: 32 minutes

Chronicle of the pioneers of Russian film, with particular attention on Medvedkin.

The Marker Variations (2007)

• Director and Script: Isaki Lacuesta
• Language: O.V. in Spanish
• Duration: 34 minutes

"If Isaki Lacuesta wants to use some of my footage, that's ok by me, at the end of the day, I have spent my life copying others" (Chris Marker). An act of cinematic love for the director of “La Jetée”. “To shoot under the pseudonym Chris Marker, you need to fulfill a few requirements, some very strange. The Markers are a secret sect who meet up only once a year… And cameras are forbidden at the meeting”.