From Traces to Form

Twittering Machine (Die Zwitscher-Maschine), Paul Klee

07.07 The City and Modern Experience

London (Patrick Keiller, 1994, 85')

Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thom Andersen, 2003, 169')

For Patrick Keiller and Thom Andersen, urban space functions as a vast archive in which architecture, cinema, memory and everyday life continually intersect. Both films proceed through accumulation, assembling observations, quotations and fragments into new constellations of meaning.

08.07 Copies, Records, and Mediated Lives

Speaking Parts (Atom Egoyan, 1989, 93')

Level Five (Chris Marker, 1997, 106')

Faces, voices and memories persist through technological forms that both preserve and transform them. If Benjamin recognised in modern media the emergence of new modes of perception, these films extend that insight into an era defined by video, databases and networks, where personal experience and historical memory are inseparable from their technical supports.

09.07 Rescuing the Fragments

The Maelstrom: A Family Chronicle (Péter Forgács, 1997, 60')

From the Pole to the Equator (Yervant Gianikian & Angela Ricci Lucchi, 1987, 96')

History survives in fragments. Working with home movies, colonial footage and neglected archival materials, Péter Forgács, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi approach the past through its surviving traces. Their films attend to gestures, faces and moments that have outlived the worlds from which they emerged. Here Benjamin's image of the historical materialist as a collector acquires cinematic form: meaning arises through acts of recovery, arrangement and renewed attention.

10.07 Media, War, Politics of Seeing

Images of the World and the Inscription of War (Harun Farocki, 1989, 75')

The Empty Center (Hito Steyerl, 1998, 62')

At this point the programme turns from the recovery of images to the conditions under which images become visible at all. The emphasis shifts from the fragment itself to the structures that govern its appearance and circulation. Technological mediation begins to encounter a more rigorous interrogation of power and administration.

11.07 No Reconciliation

Fortini/Cani (Jean-Marie Straub & Daniele Huillet, 1976, 83')

Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? (Pedro Costa, 2001, 104')

In Fortini/Cani, history unfolds through the precise relation between landspace, speech and political memory. In Pedro Costa's portrait of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet at work, attention shifts to the processes through which images, sounds and durations are shaped. The final day approaches cinema as a practice of sustained attention in which thought takes formal shape.