Tereza Stejskalová (ed.): Filmmakers of the World, Unite! Forgotten Internationalism, Czechoslovak Film and the Third World (2017) [Czech/English]

“The Algerian director Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina (1934) and the recently deceased Syrian director Nabil Maleh (1936–2016) are considered founding fathers of their national cinematography and key figures in Arab cinematography. Due to their politically engaged and aesthetically unique work, they are also read and recognised on an international level. However, there is little acknowledgement of the fact that in the 1960s both studied at FAMU in Prague, a fact that definitely influenced their work. Other distinguished Asian and African directors who studied at FAMU include the Sri Lankan director Piyasiri Gunaratna (1939) and the Tunisian documentarist Hafed Bouassida (1947), as well as dozens of other directors, cameramen and scriptwriters from various countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

The bilingual publication includes interviews with some of the directors (Hafed Bouassida, Pyasiri Gunaratna) as well as studies on the work of Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina (by Olivier Hadouchi) and Nabil Maleh (by Kay Dickinson). A more general cultural context is provided via an essay by the Czech researcher Daniela Hannová on Arab students in Czechoslovakia. Included is also a text by Alice Lovejoy mapping the trip of the Czech New Wave director František Vláčil to China.”

Publisher tranzit.cz, Prague, 2017
ISBN 9788087259412, 8087259416
237 pages
via editor

Review: Miroslav Libicher (25fps, 2018, CZ).

Interview with editor (audio, 10 min, Czech)
Book launch discussion (video, 84 min, English)

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (6 MB)

Masha Tupitsyn: Love Sounds (2015)

“Cinema remains the last medium for speaking and performing love culturally. While much emphasis has been placed on the visual iconography of love, with the exception of music very little attention has been given to love as an aural phenomenon since the tradition and practice of amour courtois. Partly inspired by Christian Marclay’s ontology of time in cinema, The Clock, and René Magritte’s word paintings, which textualized the visual tropes of painting with “written” images, Love Sounds, a 24-hour sound poem and montage, dematerializes cinema’s visual legacy and reconstitutes it as an all-tonal history of critical listening.

Love Sounds, a 24 hour audio history and essay of love in cinema, concludes Tupitsyn’s immaterial trilogy. The film is accompanied by a catalogue published by Penny-Ante, featuring written works by Masha Tupitsyn and contributors McKenzie Wark, Berit Fischer, Isiah Medina, C. Spencer Yeh, and Yaniya Lee.”

Publisher Penny-Ante Editions, Los Angeles, 2015
Success and Failure series
Open access
ISBN 9780978556440
62 pages

Publisher

PDF (37 MB)

Marco Scotini, Elisabetta Galasso (eds.): Politics of Memory: Documentary and Archive (2017)

“The anthology Politics of Memory aims to investigate the document as such, as an objective trace left by events, as material proof or the creation of reality – the strategies with which they transform a state of memory into State memory, those by means of which a historical removal is enacted, those, ultimately, in which there is an attempt to challenge permanent or temporary amnesia, opening up to the future. The artists and filmmakers contributing to this publication represent the most advanced area on an international scale of a research that inaugurates a new relationship between artistic practices and the documentary.

This publication brings together a cycle of conferences held between 2009 and 2013 at NABA – Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti Milano by international artists and film-makers. It is the result of a multi-year research project promoted by the Visual Arts Department and, more specifically, the MA in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies. This program is aimed at encouraging the comparison of international artistic experiences that have investigated forms of documentary making and archiving, beginning with the subject of memory seen as a critical exercise and practice of resistance.”

Contributions by John Akomfrah, Eric Baudelaire, Ursula Biemann, Harun Farocki, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, Khaled Jarrar, Lamia Joreige, Gintaras Makarevičius, Angela Melitopoulos, Deimantas Narkevičius, Lisl Ponger, Florian Schneider, Eyal Sivan, Hito Steyerl, Jean-Marie Teno, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Mohanad Yaqubi and Reem Shilleh.

Publisher Archive Books, Berlin, 2017
ISBN 3943620336, 9783943620337
237 pages

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (22 MB, updated on 2019-8-25)