A GUEST WITHOUT A HOST IS A GHOST
Collection in Residence

PUBLIC PROGRAM
2 - 19 June, 2014

On 29 June, clocks will be turned backward one hour, again for one month only. As time will permit: all is uneven, and everything is left at sixes and sevens.

Before Egyptian administration vaporizes that ghostly future hour, we are inviting you to a –hopefully timeless– public program as part of “A Guest Without A Host is A Ghost”. Film works by Eric Baudelaire, Julien Crépieux, John Menick, Laurent Montaron, Melvin Moti and many more will be accompanied by the notes and anecdotes of Anneka Lenssen, Amgad Naguib, Lotta Schäfer, Ania Szremski, Beirut and other local guests at the Institut Français, Contemporary Image Collective, Townhouse and Beirut. And yes it's hot, we keep our cinemas cooled.

SCHEDULE

MONDAY, 2 JUNE
20:00 – Institut Français, Munira
Eric Baudelaire –The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi, and 27 Years without Images (2011, 66 min.)
With an introduction by Lotta Schäfer.
(this film will be screened again at CiC on 10 June)

TUESDAY, 3 JUNE
20:00 – Contemporary Image Collective
A talk and curatorial conversation between two institutions Beirut and CiC – escorted by two films from the collection:
Laurent Montaron –What remains is future (2006, 6 min.)
Aurélien Froment –Théâtre de Poche (2008, 13 min.)

MONDAY, 9 JUNE
20:00 – Institut Français, Munira
Eric Baudelaire –The Ugly One (2013, 101 min.)
With an introduction by Lotta Schäfer.
(this film will be screened again at CIC on 17 June)

TUESDAY, 10 JUNE
20:00 – Contemporary Image Collective
Eric Baudelaire – The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi, and 27 Years without Images (2011, 66 min.)
With an introduction by Lotta Schäfer.

THURSDAY, 12 JUNE
20:00 – Institut Français, Munira
Frédéric Moser and Philippe Schwinger – France, Détours, Episode 2: this line is your path, 2011, 53min.)
With an introduction by Beirut.

SATURDAY, 14 JUNE
20:00 – Townhouse
Amgad Naguib and Ania Szremski in conversation about the notion of collecting, along with Jennifer Bornstein's televisionary Collectors' Favorites (1994, 21 min.)

MONDAY, 16 JUNE
20:00 – Institut Français, Munira
A very special evening in real and rare 35mm around forms without a future and a film within a film:
Melvin Moti –The Prisoner’s Cinema (2008, 22 min.)
Julien Crépieux – Microfilm (2012, 77 min.)

TUESDAY, 17 JUNE
20:00 – Contemporary Image Collective
Eric Baudelaire – The Ugly One (2013, 101 min.)
With an introduction by Lotta Schäfer.

THURSDAY, 19 JUNE
20:00 – Beirut
Beirut, Townhouse and CIC invite you to a closing reception and summer break celebration. 
Anneka Lenssen and Sarah Rifky share their notes on the exhibition at Beirut including works by Charlotte Moth, The Propeller Group & Superflex, Walid Raad/Atlas Group, Danh Vo and Carey Young. Followed by an eclectic collection of many Sigmund Freuds: A film by John Menick. There will be drinks and music until late. The more the merrier!

FILMS

Eric Baudelaire
The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi, and 27 Years without Images, 2011, 66 min.

In 1971 Kōji Wakamatsu and Masao Adachi, the two legendary filmmakers of Japanese Nouvelle Vague, realized a documentary on the Palestinian struggle in Beirut, Lebanon. Three years later, Masao Adachi became the writer for the Japanese Red Army Faction, which was linked to the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine). In this film, the thirty year-long journey of the Japanese Red Army is told by two of its protagonists. The stories are intertwined and reveal complex rapports between militancy, terrorism and cinema. This film considers the role of art and its tenable powerlessness that could lead to the shift from an artistic practice to armed struggle. It follows the shift from a cinematographic image to that of propaganda, and armed propaganda, before concentrating on the reconstruction of missing images.

Eric Baudelaire
The Ugly One, 2013, 101 min.

The Ugly One, narrated by Masao Adachi, follows a couple in Beirut coping with the loss of their child to a terrorist act. Featuring stunning photography of the city’s beaches and ruins, the film’s confusion of memory and place begins as a slightly stilted meta-textual exercise and builds to a work with political and emotional urgency. Part love affair, part political tale, half-documentary and half-fiction, the film is also a confrontation between two generations of politics and filmmaking, exploring the question of militancy and regret. As a backdrop are political impasses that are mirrored by the narrative impossibilities upon which The Ugly One is built.

Laurent Montaron
What remains is future, 2006, 6 min.

This film directly (and fictionally) refers to one of the first media dramas of the burning of the Zeppelin aircraft LZ 129 Hindenburg as it landed in New York in 1937. The power of these images, which were widely diffused in the press, had a profound haunting impact on people's consciousness. This mode of transport – both futuristic and obsolete – crystallizes a collective imaginary that was fed by cinematic, literary and mythological fiction. Realized with an anaglyph process – which superimposes two slightly offset images to produce an effect of depth – the film prevents the experience of the third dimension and emphasizes the tricks of fabrication. Due to its materiality and blurriness, the image, which is accompanied by a sinusoid wave, exerts a powerful haptic and hypnotic fascination.

Aurélien Froment
Théâtre de Poche, 2008, 13 min.

Théâtre de poche is inspired by Arthur Lloyd, a magician who was famous for being able to take out of his pockets any image requested by his spectators. His coat hid over 15.000 different prints. In Froment's work, a magician presents images by making them appear, disappear or move in space. The performance is accompanied by a rather rudimentary sound that highlights the artifice of the magician's tricks and places it in a comedic register. The work appears as a metaphor for artistic creation, how ideas coincide, and the hesitations and experiments that constitute a practice. It’s inevitable to build connections between art and magic, the artist and the magician, artistic practice with that of illusion, and of collecting and re-interpreting images.

John Menick
Starring Sigmund Freud, 2012, 28 min.

Starring Sigmund Freud is a video memento for Sigmund Freud’s little-known film career. The video collects the over 50 appearances that the character of Freud has made on films and television programs. After the 1950s, when pill vials replaced analytic couches, the father of psychoanalysis found a second career impersonating himself in everything, from a John Huston clunker to a Star Trek episode, which are gathered in this video compendium. A collection in film, and of films, of the father of psychoanalysis’ multifaceted cinematic appearances.

Frédéric Moser and Philippe Schwinger
France, Détours, Episode 2: this line is your path, 2011, 53min.

For many decades France’s self image as “La Grande Nation” was shaped by a small book, telling children what it meant to be a proud French. In 1977 Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville produced a counterstatement in a TV-documentary titled France/tour/detour/deux/enfants. Thirty years later Moser and Schwinger propose to interrogate France again and to initiate a reflection on the recurring question of “living together”. The series France, détours is made of four episodes produced in successive but independent stages, tied by the choice to follow only teenagers' voice. The second episode, shot in the Paris suburb of Pierrefitte, presents youths with different social backgrounds who do not quite confirm the stereotypes that the media and politicians are trying to create.

Jennifer Bornstein
Collectors’ Favorites, 1994, 21 min.

Collectors’ Favorites is an episode of a local cable program from the mid-nineties in which ordinary people were invited to present their personal collections—a concept that in many ways anticipates current reality TV shows and internet videos. When her turn to “perform” comes, Bornstein displays mundane and disposable—but elaborately archived or framed—consumer objects such as coffee lids, plastic straws, candy wrappers, and product labels. Through the medium of public broadcasting, she makes apparent the massive cultural penetration of advertising, and its proliferation of “throwaway culture” via images. Further, Bornstein suggests that within a massive and mercurial social network that often places value arbitrarily, any worthless mass-market products can be turned into coveted objects via absurd relations and vice versa.

Melvin Moti
The Prisoner’s Cinema, 2008, 22 min.

The Prisoner’s Cinema is a phenomenon that is described in optical and neuroscience as visual hallucinations taking place in response to prolonged visual deprivation. The film The Prisoner’s Cinema shows light shining through a rose window. We hear the voice of a scientist describing his hallucinations after having been deprived of his senses during several days. The ‘form constants’, geometric patterns recurrently observed during hallucinations, will appear in different ages and in different cultures without altering in their meaning, as their interpretation is not culturally biased. As they always remain unchanged, these are forms without a history or future.

Julien Crépieux
Microfilm, 2012, 77 min.

Microfilm is a video-graphic transcription of Samuel Fuller’s cinematographic work Pick Up On South Street (1953). Microfilm is neither a remake or an adaptation Fuller’s original but rather a transcription, in the musical sense. The structural model of the original is respected but the final object differs because of a distantiation and contextualisation, a sort of “mise en abyme” of the shooting of the film. Microfilm takes each cut, each movement and camera axe, each value from the original film. Instead of actors, several monitors broadcast Fuller’s film within various interior and exterior spaces of an uninhabited chateau. Through this configuration, the original film becomes the memory of a film that inhabits a deserted décor and is haunted by the out of shot presence of the filmic apparatus.