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The Nouba of the Women of Mount Chenoua

Writer and filmmaker Assia Djebar explores Algerian history, the psychological impact of war, and post-colonial female identity in this 1979 classic of film literature. Named for (and taking its structure from) a traditional song with five distinct movements, the film combines documentary-style observation with loose narrative form to tell the story of Lila, an Algerian expatriate returning to her country 15 years after independence has been won. In comparing her life with the lives and experiences of rural Algeriennes, Lila is able to put her childhood demons to rest and discover a new history -- one written in the ongoing strength of generations of women. Like much of Djebar's writing, the film has a strong subtext dealing with resistance to patriarchy and women's desire to appropriate the means of power and expression -- one of which, of course, is the filmmaker's camera.

The Nouba of the Women of Mount Chenoua

6.6 1978
Outlaw-Matsu Comes Home

“In Search of Unreturned Soldiers was about former soldiers of the Japanese army who chose not to return to Japan after the war. I found several of them who had remained in Thailand. Two years later, I invited one of them to make his first return visit to Japan and documented it in Outlaw-Matsu Returns Home. During the filming, my subject Fujita asked me to buy him a cleaver so that he could kill his ‘vicious brother.’ I was shocked, and asked him to wait a day so that I could plan how to film the scene. By the next morning, to my relief, Fujita had calmed down and changed his mind about killing his brother. But I couldn’t have had a sharper insight into the ethical questions provoked by this kind of documentary filmmaking.” —Shôhei Imamura

Outlaw-Matsu Comes Home

6.3 1973
Manifiesto Horizontal

In 2022, the original negative of the film Javier Aguirre created in 1973 was found. It had never been shown, due to the threat of censorship, which had already targeted his short film Che Che Che. Aguirre himself had written in the label Manifiesto Horizontal. It is the Communist Manifest written horizontally with transparent glue on 35mm film. Aguirre stated that this piece “is born out precision, geometrical thinking (…) and when something happens by chance, that chance has been thoroughly studied.”

Manifiesto Horizontal

NR 1973
Freeing the Memory

‘Freeing the Memory’ is the second of three significant performances enacted in 1976 in which Marina Abramović attempted to achieve a mental cleaning through the exhaustion of the three main faculties of expression, voice, language and body. In this piece, Abramović said every individual word she could recall until she could no longer continue without repetition. The mental strain of this act, which lasted ninety minutes, allowed the artist to exhaust her consciousness into a state of complete blankness.

Freeing the Memory

NR 1975
The End of the Game

An intimate view of the panorama of African wildlife, giving a sense of what it is really like to be there, and in a dramatic climax makes a poignant plea for conservation. Filmed in Zaire, Kenya and Tanzania, the film takes the viewer from deep inside an anthill, to the majestic giraffes suckling their young. African storms, dung beetle ritual dances, duels for supremacy, feeding time, and playtime all end as the animals disappear one by one while the sound of a rifle shatters the existing magic of life. Winner of the Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject, 1976.

The End of the Game

7.4 1976
Odette Robert

Eustache’s grandmother Odette Robert was a key figure in his life, serving as a substitute mother during much of his childhood (My Little Loves was dedicated to her). In 1971, he recorded an interview with her that went largely unseen until 2003—Eustache never screened the complete film publicly, although a radically truncated version was presented on television. In a string of long, stationary takes, the camera watches over Eustache’s shoulder while he pours countless glasses of whiskey and Odette tells the stories of her life. A number of her themes resonate with those of Eustache’s films: cruelty, male philandering, the Rosière festival of Pessac. Number Zero is a return to origins—of cinema and of the self—and an experiment in narration, both restrained and deeply personal.

Odette Robert

6.8 1971
Mao by Mao

A film-détournement biography of Mao Tse-tung in which the life of the recently deceased Great Helmsman is told in his own words, using quotes culled from various Red Guard publications. The rise to power of the film's namesake appears as the inevitable outcome of a dialectical logical. Or so the voice-over might lead one to believe. If the usual practice of détourned films is for the soundtrack to undermine the image, here the reverse occasionally takes place. The images critique Mao's words. They show that which, even in the official visual record of the times, the narrative elides. The film is dedicated to Li Yhi Zhe, the nominal author of a famous Democracy Wall critique of the Maoist state.

Mao by Mao

6.7 1977
We Spin Around the Night Consumed by the Fire

A Latin palindrome is the title of Guy Debord's last film, in which he, as narrator, explains that he will make neither concessions to the tastes of his viewers nor to the dominant ideas of his day. After extensively insulting the audience that goes to the cinema to forget its heteronomous life, the film becomes autobiographical, using images from the world of spectacle: advertising brochures, clips from feature films (Les enfants du paradis), comics, aerial footage of Paris, tracking shots through Venice, photographs of friends – all commented on by Debord, with an at times melancholy undertone: "This Paris no longer exists." His assessment is that one of the great pleasures of his life has been the sensation of the passage of time, and as a witness to the disintegration of social order, he has loved his epoch.

We Spin Around the Night Consumed by the Fire

6.7 1978
Klassenphoto

In this two-part documentary, Eberhard Fechner reconstructs the story of a class of pupils who passed their A-levels at Berlin's Lessing-Gymnasium in 1937. The starting point for the research is the class photo that gives the film its title. The conversations with the men, which revolve around their lives, bring back memories. However, it becomes clear how many of them have repressed the events of the Nazi era. Apologies, excuses and trivialization of the violence and crimes come out of many mouths.

Klassenphoto

9.0 1971
Taller de Línea y 18

This short film -one of the last made by the Afro-Cuban filmmaker before his definitive expulsion from ICAIC in 1972- alternates shots of the assembly of a vehicle designed for workers' transportation with the exploration of the conditions of workers' representation and political participation in an assembly held in the workshop. The radical disjunction between image and sound interrupts the logic (and etymology) in which the agglutinating force of the "assembly" and the operation of the "assembly" of the parts converge in the dissonant structure of this documentary.

Taller de Línea y 18

NR 1971