Dispatch 12.5.19
(L to R) Ellie Ga, Felipe Meres and Mathilde Walker-Billaud.
On Monday, December 2, Flaherty NYC hosted Program 5 WHAT THE GREEKS CALL----, in the bimonthly series, SURFACE KNOWLEDGE programmed by Courtney Stephens and Mathilde Walker-Billaud. The screening took place at Anthology Film Archives in partnership with the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York and was co-presented with Cabinet Magazine. The artists present for a post-screening discussion included Ellie Ga and Felipe Meres, with Flaherty NYC co-programmer Mathilde Walker Billaud moderating the conversation. Ellie Ga also performed her live narration Erureka: A Livehouse Play. Each filmmaker explored a different kind of surface reality, and these objects of scrutiny and contemplation asked the audience to consider, as a whole, the physicality and meaning of artifacts. Program 5 set out to examine classification systems, and how we look back at the Greeks and ancient civilizations. Preservation, as an educative tool, appears to be an honest and somewhat innocent first impulse, but attempts to organize and then display history often leave room for error and recklessness when left in the hands of human bias.
Bassae ( dir. Jean-Daniel Pollet, 1964)
The first film, Bassae, 1964, acts as a direct document, proof of a place that had its greatest days in the past. Sacred antiquity stands crumbled on the hillsides of Greece. Completely enamored by its structural presence, Jean-Daniel Pollet, takes pleasure in looking at the temple of Apollo for what it is today, and spoken words over images describe the site as “a graveyard of minerals”. Panning close-ups of the ancient columns and sweeping establishing shots of Bassae in its entirety allows one to bare intimate witness of the surfaces of a space that has been in existence since before the birth of Christ.
Implausible as it may seem, the narrator still hopes to encounter the pure essence of Bassae as it was some thousands of years ago by walking through its open corridors, examining the scattered rubble around the area, and looking upon the temples surfaces over and over again in search of clues. The narrator goes on to mull over this frustrating attempt at meaning: “But it is vain that I search, that I distance myself, that I get closer.”
Global Illumination (dir. Felipe Meres, 2017)
Visually perplexing in every way, Felipe Meres’s Global Illumination plays with perception and the reproducibility of pre-Colombian objects. Confused at first, the audience is invited to observe a type of contemporary inquiry into material history. Meres transforms these objects of importance into non-physical objects, allowing for a layer of access that wasn’t there in its original form. As digitized objects, the surfaces of these artifacts are manipulated by artificial illumination patterns through the Global Illumination software, creating a new aura of context and meaning. The question of whether or not this representation is a disservice to the original artifact is embedded in the same contemporary perspective. The reproduction of these objects as digital objects can be thought of, on the one hand, as a positive contribution, by literally enlarging and shedding new light onto artifacts and providing access. Or, one could argue, it risks stripping these cultural icons of their original contexts. In the discussion following the screening, the questions surrounding the politics of representation of these historically important artifacts came into question and how their new found “presence” might or might not be a valid categorical approach to the objects themselves. The troubled history of power and ownership over culturally and racially historical artifacts is provoked when the light (a form of sight, gaze, and desire) touches these surfaces. Meres explains how important it was for him to step out of the anthropological definition of these objects and to envision them as something different from what they represent. Meres went on to say that he wanted to explore the possibilities of these artifacts outside of themselves “in a way that didn't reinforce the discourse of the museum”
Eureka, A Lighthouse Play (dir. Ellie Ga, 2014)
Artist Ellie Ga used live performance as a medium to present her research process of attempting to reconstruct the Lighthouse of Alexandria. Using photos, text, audio interviews, and video clips, Ga opened the viewer up to a Pandora's box of both history and contemporary issues. She narrated her experiences as a series of chronological facts, but what comes across through her narration is the overwhelming and chaotic nature to the research she has undertaken, and the relationship between knowledge and chance. She bounces around from source to source, in investigative pursuit of what happened to the Lighthouse in Alexandria and what it looked like when it was standing. Ga emphasized the importance of physical surfaces in her work by elaborating on the fact that the scholars and researchers she worked with had a very banal yet significant job of constantly reexamining and turning over every surface of every stone in the harbor. Ellie also alludes to the fact that she herself was skimming the figurative surface of this subject matter, as she was unable to speak Arabic, among other obstacles, yet these restrictions acted as guidelines for Ga. Through her performative account of the timeline of events, the audience comes to realize that hearsay, gossip and games of telephone played a large role in archaeological inquiry, a process that one assumes to be fact-based and objective.
written by Krystalle Macqueen & photos by Abby Lord
PROGRAMME
Jean-Daniel Pollet BASSAE 1964, 9 min, 35mm-to-digital
Aurélien Froment THÉÂTRE DE POCHE 2007, 12 min, digital
Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni BASSAE BASSAE 2014, 9 min, 35mm-to-digital
Felipe Meres GLOBAL ILLUMINATION 2017, 8 min, digital
Ellie Ga EUREKA, A LIGHTHOUSE PLAY 2014, 45 min, live performance
Total running time: 80 min.
Join us, December 14, 7pm at Metrograph for Closing Night, Program 6 CONTACT HIGHS. Halsey Burgund, Katherin McInnis, Francesca Panetta and Andrei Ujică will be in person to discuss their work. A feature documentary film from Europe and two short films from the USA explore the space race, public spectacle, and the gaze from afar. Out of the Present captures the fall of the Soviet Union from the perspective of outer space through Russian cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, who lived on the Mir space station from May 1991 to March 1992. The screening will be preceded by Katherin McInnis’s Hat Trick and Francesca Panetta and Halsey Burgund’s In Event of Moon Disaster, two short films that reevaluate the moon landing, and the thin boundary between cinematic and scientific knowledge.