This Monday’s selection is “Sun Song” (2013/video/15min/silent) by Joel Wanek. Inspired by the sounds and philosophy of Sun Ra, this silent workaday evocation of earthbound interstellar travel features working class African American workers as seldom depicted: with grace and poetry. That Sun Song has garnered heady comparisons to work as varied as Nathaniel Dorsky’s, Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Solaris”, Chris Marker’s “Passengers” and Luis Bunuel’s “Illusion Travel’s by Streetcar” and “Exterminating Angel” gives some sense of how vibrant and resonant Wanek’s vision is.

The next video in the series is Afronauts a retro-futurist vision of earth bound space travel by Christina De Middel.From De Middel’s Vimeo page:In 1964, still living the dream of their recently gained independence, Zambia started a space program that would put the first African on the moon catching up with the USA and the Soviet Union in the space race.

Only a few optimists supported the project by Edward Makuka, the school teacher in charge of presenting the ambitious program and getting its necessary funding. But the financial aid never came, as the United Nations declined their support, and one of the astronauts, a 16 year-old girl, got pregnant and had to quit.

…

As a photojournalist I have always been attracted by the eccentric lines of story-telling avoiding the same old subjects told in the same old ways.

Now, with my personal projects, I respect the basis of the truth but allow myself to break the rules of veracity trying to push the audience into analyzing the patterns of the stories we consume as real.

“Afronauts” is based on the documentation of an impossible dream that only lives in the pictures. I started from a real fact that took place 50 years ago and rebuilt the documents adapting them to my personal imagery.

A couple of things about the online link and the film itself: first, the link is to an excerpt so you’ll get a good 3.5 minute taste of the film; and second the original film, “Our Small Houses,” had just recently been restored. These two things speak to me about the two intertwining concepts of accessibility and preservation, so I’ll quickly pose a couple of questions. Should we expect everything to be available online? I’m not so sure. A lot of things that I thought about sharing as part of MMM are simply not available (now, ever?). Is restoration what made it possible for this film to be made? Perhaps, though I don’t know. But if it were, one might wonder at all the other images that are waiting to be re-discovered (or hoping not to be). But to fill you in on what you don’t see from this excerpt: The film opens on black with the sound of marching feet and moves quickly into the distorted fluttering or shuttering sound evocative of…motors, machine guns, the quickly flapping wings of a moth, or maybe a film projector. And at the end, a surprising twist in which the film erupts, first via soundtrack, from a woman bellydancing and then her image superimposed onto a contemporary, colorful scene of an MTV-style beach club, techno beats and all. This is how one gets catapulted into a present state. Speaking generally about her work, Basma writes “Information is never objective, documentary is not a representation of a “real” event, and experimental cinema offers various aesthetic structures through which to find alternative ways of delivering information.” This digging through the archive and experimenting with how those images/information is delivered, perhaps its kind of like a radical visual archeology…

For the first in the series, I’ve selected a short work by French filmmaker Jean-Gabriel Périot from 2006, Eût-elle été criminelle / Even If She Had Been A Criminal, which presents a sort of condensed history of WWII, and takes as its topic the public humiliation of French citizens who slept with their German occupiers during the war. Like much of his work, the short is highly constructed from archival footage and Internet-sourced images. Périot is a tight and precise editor who creates image sequences that become social critiques on labor conditions, war atrocities, gay rights, persecution, and revenge. There is a theoretical foundation to his method: the “iconology of the interval” proposed by German cultural theorist Aby Warburg. The idea being that history is located in the intervals between two images. On this Périot himself says: “Those dark and unexpected spaces were purposed to the viewers as spaces of liberty, the liberty for them to think and to fill the missing links by their own thinking. There, in a time where media try obviously to make the audience not to think, is the place for some radical and political art.” For all my long-windedness though, it’s best to just watch the film. You’ll get it because it hits you in the gut.

link to Jean-Gabriel’s film: https://vimeo.com/126248920