Blind Cinema

Marta Azparren’s Blind Cinema project explores the need for a visual interruption, a degree of blindness to counteract overexposure to images. From Black Square by Malevich to Blackout Tuesday on Instagram, it analyses how monochrome, the void and the pause are necessary to change the way images happen, how a dose of blindness is involved in each of the phases of the aesthetic experience, and how the absence of an image also awakens viewer consciousness.
Xcèntric hosts the session of the cycle dedicated to the colour blue. Blue, by Derek Jarman, is a blind film, made by a blind director, ill with an invisible virus that made those who suffered from it socially invisible. The session ends with Nathaniel Dorsky’s Pneuma, a screening of unexposed film, literally “blind cinema”. The Greek pneuma is breath and also soul; where contagion spreads, and where contemplation is achieved.

 

Program:

Pneuma, Nathaniel Dorsky, 1983, 27', 16mm.

Blue, Derek Jarman, 1993, 80’, DCP, original version with Catalan subtitles.

Blue copy from Basilisk Communications and Pneuma print from Ligtcone.
Session curated by Marta Azparren and presented by Anna Manubens.

Other screenings in the Cine ciego session: Filmoteca de Catalunya (white and red sessions) and Zumzeig (black session). Alongside the screenings, La Capella hosts activities, workshops, performances and installations around blindness, impaired vision and countervisual strategies (+info).