Still/Life presents three works of cinema that take the still image as a starting point for inquiry into memory, the passage of time, the intertwining of the political and the personal, and the nature of the medium of cinema itself. In Ulysse (1982, 22 min), Agnès Varda revisits a mysterious photograph she had taken in 1954 of a naked man, a child, and a dead goat on a beach, and follows up with the man and boy thirty years later. Printed Matter (2011, 29 min) depicts photographs, presented in contact sheets, by the late photojournalist André Brutmann (the artist’s father), who covered pivotal and historic events of the Israel-Palestine conflict over two decades. Off-screen we hear Andre’s partner and fellow journalist Hanne Foighel as she recalls the events photographed while tenderly interweaving memories of their concurrent personal and familial life. Standard Gauge (1984, 35 min), an incredible work of conceptual art, is a continuous 35 minute static shot (filmed on 1000 feet of 16mm film) where artist Morgan Fisher presents fragments of strips of 35mm film frames he acquired while working as a commercial film editor in Hollywood. Fisher wryly narrates the origin of these pieces of film and their personal meaning, creating an examination of the material of film and the institutions that produce it.
Printed Matter
Sirah Foighel Brutmann & Eitan Efrat
2011 / Belgium / 29 minutes / 16mm
16mm film print courtesy of the artists and Auguste Orts
Printed Matter displays the conflation of private lives and contemporary geopolitics. The evidence comes from Brutmann’s father, André, who was, up to his untimely death in 2002, a freelance press photographer covering two decades of Middle East news for local newspapers as well as for International, mostly European, print media. His voluminous collection offers a visual chronicle of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that consists of surprisingly familiar images of civil dissent, armed violence, funeral grief and political speeching in both Israel and the Occupied Territories. After becoming a dad in 1983 and finishing a day of work, with a few pictures left on the film roll in his camera, this professional media worker would regularly photograph his daughter and wife, later a family of four. Printed Matter simply shows an exquisite selection of contact sheets including memorable events such as the First and Second Intifada, the assassination of Yitzchak Rabin and the birth of Sirah Foighel Brutmann. Instead of using formatted captions, the filmmakers choose for the impromptu voice comment by the first witness to these histories: Hanne Foighel, André’s partner and freelance journalist, reminisces on the past while browsing through its records and getting her memory triggered. As if it were a fragile time capsule steered by her provident off-screen voice, Printed Matter takes its viewers on a still yet penetrating excursion into the intimacies of political history and the politics of intimate lives.
Ulysse
Agnès Varda
1982 / France / 22 minutes / 35mm presented digitally
A ruminative cross-pollination of film and photography, Agnès Varda uses a mysterious still image that she took in the late fifties—of a nude man (the photographer Guy Bourdin, a friend of hers) and a child on a rocky beach, flanked by a dead goat with a swelling belly in the foreground—as the springboard for a contemplation on the passing of time and the subjectivity of meaning in art.
Standard Gauge
Morgan Fisher
1984 / US / 35 minutes / 16mm
16mm film print courtesy of the Morgan Fisher Collection at the Academy Film Archive
A frame of frames, a piece of pieces, a length of lengths. Standard gauge on substandard; narrower, yes, but longer. An ECU that’s an ELS. Disjecta membra; Hollywood anthologized. A kind of autobiography of its maker, a kind of history of the institution from whose shards it is composed, the commercial motion picture industry. A mutual interrogation between 35mm and 16mm, the gauge of Hollywood and the gauge of the amateur and independent. (Morgan Fisher)