SESSION 112, ILLEGAL_CINEMA

Screening of Simone Barbès, ou Le vertu (Marie-Claude Treihlou, 1980, 77’), preceded by Nothing Is Something (Amina Gingold, 2023, 2’) and L’arrotino (Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub, 2001, 7’), followed by a discussion. Session proposed by Bruno Delgado Ramo.

In a conversation with Roberto Martínez Benages on the three films, the question arose of the relation of discourse to action. At times, the discourse only bursts out following the action. Narrative actions are what predict the discourse. The plot becomes words, accusation, declaration, recognition, understanding, while the action persists in the retina. At other times, the discourse breaks away from the action. The words give birth to the imagined action. They predict it. At yet others, the words have their own visual identity – the text on the screen. Through an open montage, the poetic concatenation of elements makes us play with a puzzle consisting of word-image resonances. Films speak to us in so many other different ways. The three pieces speak to us separately, and at the same time this program is an occasion for producing a combined and ephemeral text. Amongst so many options, that combined text could be a defence of the world’s trifles, an invitation to adopt a position starting from them. In the first film, observation of what is unconnected makes us find new connections. In the second, an inspired knife-grinder sings praises to multiplicity. In the third, the foyer of a porn cinema in Paris in the 1980s becomes a tribune from which to address the community that turns up there.

“—Nothing is beyond the recognition.”

(Nothing Is Something)

“—At times one confuses the world’s trifles with offenses against the world.”
(L’arrotino)

“—Tell me: are there many spectators?
—We don’t know. We don’t count them.
—We cut the tickets, that’s all.
—But don’t you know, sociologically speaking, what type of public attends?

—No idea. We close our eyes, tightly, and in the face of a lot of things.”

(Simone Barbès, ou Le vertu)

* Subtitles for Simone Barbès, ou Le vertu prepared by Pablo García Canga on the occasion of a screening at the Cineclub Chantal on June 20, 2017 at Filmoteca Popular de Madrid (CS La Ingobernable).

Bruno Delgado Ramo (Seville, 1991) is a filmmaker and artist-researcher who trained as an architect. He conceives of his interdisciplinary work as investigations based on experimental and material practice involving cinematographic media, in which the ideas of specificity, process or spatial reading are important, with filming and projection conceived as light processes in specific localizations and contexts. His practice is concretized in films, settings for projection, actions and publications.