Gandules
Gandules'10
Lost, lost, lost
Audiovisuals + Festivals
Free
More than ever Gandules'10 is full of fiction: lost, aimless characters, endless searches, journeys to the unknown... The cinema has often shown labyrinths and has made them explicit. But this cycle drives us through other labyrinths, those that are often unseen: the invisible labyrinths that lock individuals in social circles, or the imaginary ones that create desires and mental escapes. What does it happen when the labyrinth is not an image, but a state?
Lost, lost, lost is a cycle about the desire for movement: get out of a place, escape, change or get transformed, conceive another world. Because what is important may not be to chose the wrong path, but the possibility to start a new one.
WEEK 1
Tuesday 3 August
Los orígenes del marketing (pieza pluma sobre asuntos pesados ) Produced by Gandules’10! PREMIÈRE
Elías León Siminiani, 2010, 8’, O.V.
After shooting in India, the director finds threats –sounds, images- that shape a map of a film yet to come.
Wanda
Barbara Loden, 1970, 100’, O.V. Spanish Subtitles
Restored this year, this film, directed and played by Barbara Loden –the only film she ever directed-, who was Elia Kazan’s wife, is a cult classic. Shot in a radically independent way, without lightning or wardrobe, remained invisible during more than thirty years: a harsh road-movie, like Cassavetes cinema, about the neurotic and aimless journey of a woman that has left behind the monotony of a family life. One of the most striking feminine portraits of North-American cinema.
Wednesday 4 August
Tout la mémoire du monde [All the memory of the world]
Alain Resnais, 196¸ 20’, O.V. Catalan Subtitles
The library seen as a circuit, the circuit as a city, the city as a labyrinth. And the documentary as fiction.
Alphaville
Jean-Luc Godard, 1965, 95’, O.V. Spanish Subtitles
The famous agent Lemmy Caution is sent to exterior planets: dehumanized cities of cold winters, huge buildings and incomprehensible rituals, where the feelings- and their expressions- are banned. Godard, or how to transform Paris and the cinema into a science fiction world.
Thursday 5 August
El pan y la calle [The Bread and alley]
Abbas Kiarostami, 1970, 10’, No Dialogues
In his first film Kiarostami faced all his crew: he was creating a method. The plot is simple: a boy, the tortuous streets of Teheran, and a dog. A wonder of rhythm and emotion.
Banditi a Orgosolo [Bandits of Orgosolo]
Vittorio de Seta, 1961, 94’, O.V. Spanish Subtitles
A shepherd is accused of theft and assassination and sets out on a journey that goes from lyricism to the harshest reality. At the hands of De Seta, fiction and direct cinema form a unique, beautiful, and tortuous shape.
WEEK 2
Tuesday 10 August
El ángel exterminador [The Exterminating Angel]
Luis Buñuel, 1962, 93’, O.V.
A mundane party becomes an enclosure that reveals bourgeoisie’s hypocrisy and its grotesque forms. After a conventional dinner, the guests seem unable to leave the house, as if they were in an invisible labyrinth. Buñuel, again, destroyed the social forms to turn the bourgeoisie into savages. “While the film you are about to see may seem to you enigmatic and incoherent, so is life. The author claims having had no intention of playing with the symbols, at least not consciously. The explanation that may be given of The Exterminating Angel is perhaps that there is no rational explanation.” (L. Buñuel)
Wednesday 11 August
La ley del más fuerte [Fox and his friends]
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974, 123’, V.O. Spanish Subtitles
An unemployed young man, played by Fassbinder himself, wins the lottery and introduces himself to the most sophisticated homosexual circles. There he meets a boy, son of a good family who had come down in the world that will cruelly take advantage of the man of humble origins. The decadence of a middle class already in decline, an intense and very sensitive study of the oppressive social circles, this is one of the starkest and most ruthless films by the German director.
Thursday 12 August
The Servant
Joseph Losey, 1963, 105’, O.V. Spanish Subtitles
A young aristocrat buys a new house in a residential neighbourhood in London and hires Barrett (Dirk Bogarde), as his servant. But the manipulative and attractive butler achieves, progressively and with the help of his sister, the control and the subjugation of the gentleman, in a very subtle inversion of the master’s and the servant’s roles. Starting from a script by Harold Pinter, Losey shot one of his subtlest and tinged portraits of social hatred, class struggle and the decadence of the British aristocracy.
WEEK 3
Tuesday 17 August
Meshes of the Afternoon
Maya Deren i Alexander Hammid, 1945, 17’, No Dialogues
A seminal and always mysterious film on dreams, split personalities and sexual impulses. “I make my pictures for what Hollywood spends on lipstick.” (M.Deren)
Toby Dammit
Federico Fellini, 1968, 44’, O.V. Spanish Subtitles
When he was commissioned to adapt a Poe’s tale, Fellini imagined a story about an actor arriving at Cinecittà to shoot the crazy project of the first catholic western, and setting out for the most frantic and amazing journey (on a convertible) never seen before around the city of Rome.
Wednesday 18 August
Lost Highway
David Lynch, 1997, 120’, O.V. Spanish Subtitles
In 1997, after some failures, Lynch’s reputation was at rock bottom. Then, the first shot of Lost Highway appeared: the camera frantically moving forward a dark road at Bowie’s I’m deranged rhythm. Lynch was leading us to the “psychogenic fugue” a journey around desire, jealousy, sensuality and the rhythms of imagination in freedom. “There are things that happen sometimes that open a door that lets you soar out and feel a bigger thing. Lost Highway is like a combination of things. It has a kind of a horror film, it has a kind of a thriller, it has a kind of a... Basically it's a mystery, that's what it is, a mystery”.
Thursday 19 August
La père de mes enfants [The father of my children] PREMIÈRE
Mia Hansen-Love, 2009, 110’, O.V. Catalan Subtitles
Grégoire is a cinema producer: he lives fast between his family house and his film company, Moon Films, in Paris. At the weekends he goes to the countryside with his three daughters and his wife. He is a passionate and charismatic man, full of life. But the company goes through some severe financial problems: he decides to go on with his projects and dreams. An emotional story about the fragility of life and ideals, relationships and survival.
WEEK 4
Tuesday 24 August
White Material PREMIÈRE
Claire Denis, 2009, 100’, O.V. Spanish Subtitles
In a country at the heart of Africa, shaken by an imminent civil war and barbarity, Maria (Isabelle Huppert) decides not to go away and to withstand in his coffee plantation. Claire Denis offers a new view of Africa, her childhood’s territory: a hypnotic and harsh film, full of energy where the cinema is a furious rhythm.
Wednesday 25 August
Sans Soleil [Sunless]
Chris Marker, 1983, 100’, V.O. Catalan Subtitles
From Tokyo to the San Francisco of Vertigo, from Cape Verde to Iceland, from Guinea-Bissau to Paris, Marker frees our imagination so that we “compose” the instants of happiness and “the things that quicken the heart”. Fascinating and visionary, this film is a voyage through the rhythms and the spirals of time, a love letter, an essay on revolutions, an elegy to the cinema, a science fiction documentary. No film seems to contain as many films in itself.
Thursday 26 August
El mural (Shaban i Subhan) Produced by Gandules’10! PREMIÈRE
Oscar Pérez and Mia de Ribot, 2010, 5’, O.V.
End of June, school is over, the parent’s shop is open all day long and part of the night, Shaban and Subhan turn the Raval into their own summer playground.
Little Fugitive
Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin and Ray Ashbury, 1953, 80’, O.V. Catalan Subtitles
Joey, a seven-year-old boy, thinks he has killed his older brother and runs away from home to Coney Island beach, in New York, to live his own adventures, between melancholy and humour. Morris Engel designed a 35 mm portable camera to capture the sensation of spontaneity and truth of this original film, that opened up new spaces of freedom for the cinema: "Our French New Wave would never have come into being, if it hadn't been for Little fugitive” (F. Truffaut)
Directors: Ray Ashbury, Luis Buñuel, Vittorio de Seta, Claire Denis, Maya Deren, Morris Engel, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Alexander Hammid, Abbas Kiarostami, Barbara Loden, Joseph Losey, David Lynch, Chris Marker, Ruth Orkin, Óscar Pérez, Alain Resnais, Elías León Siminiani
This activity is part of Through Labyrinths, Gandules 2010, Gandules