Means without ends

Which is the history of experimental film in 16mm? Which are the most important titles? We activate the Room Z's 16mm projector with the filmmaker Laida Lertxundi and her proposal to review the ABC of the History of the North American experimental cinema in their original format.

• New York, Near Sleep (for Saskia), Petter Hutton, 1970, 10', 16mm 

• Fly, Yoko Ono, 1979, 19', 16mm

• 8 ½ x 11 James Benning, 33', 16mm

• Melting, Thom Andersen, 1965, 6', 16mm
  

“What is Gesture?

What characterizes gesture is that nothing is being produced or acted, but rather something is being endured and supported. Gesture, opens the sphere of ethos as the more proper sphere of that which is human.”
Agamben, Giorgio. “Notes on Gesture,” Means without Ends.

Víctor Iriarte from Tabakalera asked me to put together a program of older works on 16mm and I chose these four films by some very beloved mentors of mine as well what to me is a very feminist and influential work by Yoko Ono.

These four films bring us close to landscapes in the form of cities, bodies and objects while narrative is alluded to and replaced my structural approaches film-time. In these journeys to bucolic spaces and places of production the mechanics of making a film are brought to light, making suspension of disbelief impossible. We are invited to explore distance and correspondence between objects and persons, aloneness and intimacy, rooms and open spaces, between present and past tense…that in-between-time where life happens.

Laida Lertxundi, Los Angeles, California, 2015