27 years without images (on the possibility of cinema after revolution)
Screening and conversation with Eric Baudelaire and Homay King
Slought Foundation | Monday, February 20, 2012; 6:30-8:30pm
Free (Reservation not required)
Slought Foundation is pleased to announce “27 years without images (on the possibility of cinema after revolution),” an evening film screening and conversation with artist Eric Baudelaire and film theorist Homay King, of Bryn Mawr College, on Monday, February 20, 2012 from 6:30-8:30pm at Slought Foundation. The event will begin with a screening of Eric Baudelaire’s The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi, and 27 Years without Images (2011, 66 minutes).
In Eric Baudelaire’s film, the political and personal journeys of the Japanese Red Army are reexamined as an anabasis, at once a lost path towards the unknown and a return towards home. From Tokyo to Beirut amid the post-1968 ideological fever, and from Beirut to Tokyo after the end of the Cold War, the thirty-year itinerary of a radical fringe of the revolutionary left is recounted by two of its protagonists. May Shigenobu – daughter of Fusako Shigenobu, who founded the small group – witnessed it closely. Born in secrecy in Lebanon, a clandestine life was all she knew until age 27. But a new era began in her life with her mother’s arrest in 2000 and her adaptation to a suddenly very public existence. The second character is Masao Adachi, the legendary Japanese avant-garde director who joined the Japanese Red Army and the Palestinian cause in 1974. For this theorist of fukeiron (a movement of filmmakers who sought to reveal the structures of power by filming landscapes) his 27 years of voluntary exile were without images, since those he filmed in Lebanon were destroyed during the war.
Slought Foundation is also pleased to announce The Music of Ramon Raquello, an exhibition of work by artist Eric Baudelaire, on display in the galleries from March 13-April 13, 2012. The three works in this exhibition are diverse in material and structure: Sugar Water is a video installation, Chanson d’Automne a newspaper collage, and Ante-Memorial a set of letters. Each of these works imagines a disaster – potential or actual, past or ongoing – and invites speculation about what forms “resistance” might take in its aftermath. The exhibition’s title references Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds radio play and its fictional orchestra whose music is interrupted by reports of an alien invasion (in fact, the music was performed by the CBS house band under the direction of Bernard Herrmann). Pressing the line between fiction and fact, the three works juxtapose historical givens with historical possibility, and solicit reflection about alternate futures, images, and forms of coexistence. Click here to read the full curatorial essay by Homay King.
Eric Baudelaire was born in 1973 in Salt Lake City, USA. He lives and works in Paris. Through film, photography, printmaking and installation, he explores the relationship between images and events, documents and narratives. He has recently had exhibitions at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Elizabeth Dee Gallery in New York, Juana de Aizpuru in Madrid, Greta Meert in Brussels, and is preparing an exhibition at Gasworks in London. His films were selected at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and his work is present in several public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Fond National d’Art Contemporain, and the FRAC Auvergne.
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