11/01 Post-imaginatives and overcoming political turmoils:
The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)
The first feature length film by Victor Erice, a fiction that metaphorically alludes to the Franco era, projecting the viewer’s imagination to a post-Franco world. The film takes place in a rural village in Spain in the forties, centering around a small girl, Ana, who attends a road-cinema screening of Frankenstein, thereafter seemingly becoming possessed by this figure.
11/15 Anthropocene Imaginary
Upstream Color (2013)
“A man and woman are drawn together, entangled in the life cycle of an ageless organism. Identity becomes an illusion as they struggle to assemble the loose fragments of wrecked lives.”
A science-fiction film with an impressionistic style that heavily relies on sound and the senses, and can be interpreted in the context of an “Anthropocene Imaginary” (Kara, 2016). Through this lens, the film can be read as projecting environmental exploitation and anxiety onto human bodies.
11/29 Human – non-human relationships
Le Quattro Volte (2010)
A film taking place in a remote valley in southern Italy, intersecting the lives of a Shepherd, a charcoal-burner, a tree and goats. His camera places as much importance on the story of non-human beings as the human characters, placing them on the same level. Frammatino’s approach to cinema is quite unique; he comes from a background of architecture, photography, and video installations, and has only recently has been working with the film medium. This is his second feature length.
12/13 (Post) Anthropocene cinema – we end on a dystopic tone
Homo Sapiens (2016)
The images could be taken from a science fiction film set on planet Earth after it’s become uninhabitable. Abandoned buildings – housing estates, shops, cinemas, hospitals, offices, schools, a library, amusement parks and prisons. Places and areas being reclaimed by nature, such as a moss-covered bar with ferns growing between the stools, a still stocked soft drinks machine now covered with vegetation, an overgrown rubbish dump, or tanks in the forest. Tall grass sprouts from cracks in the asphalt. Birds circle in the dome of a decommissioned reactor, a gust of wind makes window blinds clatter or scraps of paper float around, the noise of the rain: sounds entirely without words, plenty of room for contemplation. All these locations carry the traces of erstwhile human existence and bear witness to a civilisation that brought forth architecture, art, the entertainment industry, technologies, ideologies, wars and environmental disasters.
