- You are here: Home > TWO POINTS OF FAILURE
You are here
Cinema Elvire Popesco -
Saturday, December 13, 2014 - 20:00
Written by:
Michael Moshe Dahan
Cast:
Jean-Luc Godard
Cinematography:
Tobias Spellman
Editing:
Michael Moshe Dahan
Sound:
Josh Eichenbaum, Kevin DeKimpe
Producer:
Braxton Pope
Production:
Studio Dahan, Sodium Fox
Romanian premiere
A film like an epitaph, TWO POINTS OF FAILURE dissolves in negative emulsion a photograph of Jean-Luc Godard, thus conceptualizing the slow disappearance of analogic techniques of filmmaking and, with it, the death of an entire tradition in cinema. The image melts into abstract patterns of movement and color, the process then being reversed, ironically, by digital means. Inspired by the failure of a camera prototype commissioned by Godard, the film deconstructs and reassembles itself, being both a testament of a disappearance, and a question about the future of cinema. (Diana Mereoiu, BIEFF)
Director:
Israeli-American artist MICHAEL MOSHE DAHAN spent the first decade of his career as a Hollywood film producer (on The Patriot, starring Mel Gibson, for example) and production executive before coming to image and film-making as a conceptual practice. He has shown at Cirrus Gallery, Los Angeles, the Irvine Fine Arts Center, or the University Art Gallery at UC Irvine. Dahan graduated with an MFA in art with an emphasis in critical theory from the University of California. Currently a PhD candidate at UCSD and UC Irvine’s Joint Doctoral Program in Drama and Theatre, he is also a recipient of the Medici Circle and University of California Institute for Research in the Arts grants.
Website:
Contact:
studio[at]michaelmoshedahan[dot]com
Festivals, awards:
- International Film Festival Rotterdam 2014
- Tribeca Film Festival 2014
- Edinburgh International Film Festival 2014
- MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles 2013
Curator's comment:
In 1976, the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard commissioned the design and fabrication of a 35mm motion picture camera that would be as compact as an 8mm camera and as self-contained as the video portapak. The arrival of the portapak signaled the beginning of the slow demise of analogue film recording techniques, a cycle whose finality can be marked most recently by the wholesale transition to digital technologies. TWO POINTS OF FAILURE is a conceptual experimental 35mm film which frames this demise and takes as its primary subject matter Godard's failed prototype for the compact 35mm camera. Named the Aaton 35-8, this camera, while small and portable, suffered from myopia and was simply too loud. Two Points of Failure is about this camera that could not see. The film as you see it was constituted by dissolving negative emulsion in a chemical solution while recording the sounds of its own making. It functions as an index of a disappearance, a trace of the objects, techniques and analogue medium which has been all but lost to us, and the remainder of the object that has been extirpated. The primary operation of the film is a process of closer, repeated, extended looking. (Michael Moshe Dahan)
In 1976, the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard commissioned the design and fabrication of a 35mm motion picture camera that would be as compact as an 8mm camera and as self-contained as the video portapak. The arrival of the portapak signaled the beginning of the slow demise of analogue film recording techniques, a cycle whose finality can be marked most recently by the wholesale transition to digital technologies. TWO POINTS OF FAILURE is a conceptual experimental 35mm film which frames this demise and takes as its primary subject matter Godard's failed prototype for the compact 35mm camera. Named the Aaton 35-8, this camera, while small and portable, suffered from myopia and was simply too loud. Two Points of Failure is about this camera that could not see. The film as you see it was constituted by dissolving negative emulsion in a chemical solution while recording the sounds of its own making. It functions as an index of a disappearance, a trace of the objects, techniques and analogue medium which has been all but lost to us, and the remainder of the object that has been extirpated. The primary operation of the film is a process of closer, repeated, extended looking. (Michael Moshe Dahan)