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International Competition - Alternative History: Lying to Tell the Truth
Curatorial presentation by Diana Mereoiu
Paraphrasing Jean Cocteau's saying “I am the lie that always tells the truth”, the competition theme program ALTERNATIVE HISTORY: Lying to Tell the Truth relativizes notions such as falsehood and truth, reality and fiction, analysing the way objectivity and subjectivity intertwine in constructing personal and collective memory. In the end, history is always a relative construct, according to the perspective it is seen from. A thought-provoking proposal, made possible thanks to the kind support offered by the Rule of Law Program South-East Europe of Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung.
The spectator finds himself in a vulnerable position, taken out of his comfort zone and challenged to look at reality with a critical and nuanced view. One after another, personal history, universal history and cinema itself are deconstructed and our preconceptions are crumbling, leaving room for a new, fresh way to perceive the world.
Directly attacking capitalism, consumer society and their influence on our culture, THE BURIED ALIVE VIDEOS, a new work by unconventional visual artist Roee Rosen, exposes history as nothing more than a construct, while wittingly tackling the taboos around topics such as sexuality and religion. Fighting history with counterfeit history, this compilation of videos attributed to a supposed collective of ex-Soviet artists at odds with the values around them fictionalizes reality in order to convey essential truths, in a thoroughly enjoyable mix of cynicism and absurd humour.
Keeping up with debunking the myths of universal history in the making, REDEMPTION reveals the fluidity of cinematic meaning and the mechanisms of the collective construction of public figures. Voice-overs (attributed to some of the most controversial politicians of our times: Pedro Passos Coelho, Silvio Berlusconi, Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel) recall important stages in the characters' lives which had an impact on who they became, continuously transforming the archive footage into devices of remembrance, abstraction, idealized reconstructions of the past and projections of the most intimate desires and thoughts. Opening thus a possibility of redemption, Miguel Gomes exposes our natural tendency to construct simplified representations, a mechanism in which we often also cannibalize public figures and their personal histories, draining them of humanness, in our effort to make sense of the world. The screening is possible courtesy of The Match Factory and Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains.
THE SHADOW'S SHARE also uses our susceptibility to believing stories of exceptionality and personal struggles of (more or less) known individuals, and our assumption that this way we can get to truly know that person on an intimate level. A falsification of artistic avant-garde history, this short film of aestheticized macabre weaves a counterfeit personal history around its character, the vanished photographer Oskar Benedek. Offering his protagonist for examination, Olivier Smolders violently brings down the viewer from his ultimately condescending position of one who believes he has solved the mystery of how another is, and shows him that people cannot be known, much less deciphered.
In FOREVER, personal and universal history collide in a woman’s story of adolescence after the Chernobyl accident. Visually replicating the effects of radioactivity, this nostalgic bricolage of archive and pop-culture material signed by Daniel McIntyre creates a complex comparison between the ephemerality of film, that of the human body and of memory. As the image withers into abstraction, the only thing that is left is to accept that individual lives cannot be lived outside of worldly struggles, but are an organic part of them, forever locked in a mutually influenced process of change.
The spectator finds himself in a vulnerable position, taken out of his comfort zone and challenged to look at reality with a critical and nuanced view. One after another, personal history, universal history and cinema itself are deconstructed and our preconceptions are crumbling, leaving room for a new, fresh way to perceive the world.
Directly attacking capitalism, consumer society and their influence on our culture, THE BURIED ALIVE VIDEOS, a new work by unconventional visual artist Roee Rosen, exposes history as nothing more than a construct, while wittingly tackling the taboos around topics such as sexuality and religion. Fighting history with counterfeit history, this compilation of videos attributed to a supposed collective of ex-Soviet artists at odds with the values around them fictionalizes reality in order to convey essential truths, in a thoroughly enjoyable mix of cynicism and absurd humour.
Keeping up with debunking the myths of universal history in the making, REDEMPTION reveals the fluidity of cinematic meaning and the mechanisms of the collective construction of public figures. Voice-overs (attributed to some of the most controversial politicians of our times: Pedro Passos Coelho, Silvio Berlusconi, Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel) recall important stages in the characters' lives which had an impact on who they became, continuously transforming the archive footage into devices of remembrance, abstraction, idealized reconstructions of the past and projections of the most intimate desires and thoughts. Opening thus a possibility of redemption, Miguel Gomes exposes our natural tendency to construct simplified representations, a mechanism in which we often also cannibalize public figures and their personal histories, draining them of humanness, in our effort to make sense of the world. The screening is possible courtesy of The Match Factory and Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains.
THE SHADOW'S SHARE also uses our susceptibility to believing stories of exceptionality and personal struggles of (more or less) known individuals, and our assumption that this way we can get to truly know that person on an intimate level. A falsification of artistic avant-garde history, this short film of aestheticized macabre weaves a counterfeit personal history around its character, the vanished photographer Oskar Benedek. Offering his protagonist for examination, Olivier Smolders violently brings down the viewer from his ultimately condescending position of one who believes he has solved the mystery of how another is, and shows him that people cannot be known, much less deciphered.
In FOREVER, personal and universal history collide in a woman’s story of adolescence after the Chernobyl accident. Visually replicating the effects of radioactivity, this nostalgic bricolage of archive and pop-culture material signed by Daniel McIntyre creates a complex comparison between the ephemerality of film, that of the human body and of memory. As the image withers into abstraction, the only thing that is left is to accept that individual lives cannot be lived outside of worldly struggles, but are an organic part of them, forever locked in a mutually influenced process of change.
