Friday & Saturday 11.12-13.10 — Facs of Life — a film between Deleuze and his students — Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson
Comments Off on Friday & Saturday 11.12-13.10 — Facs of Life — a film between Deleuze and his students — Silvia Maglioni & Graeme ThomsonFriday & Saturday 11.12-13.10 — Facs of Life — a film between Deleuze and his students — Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson
CONTENTS:
1. About these 2 days
2. About Friday Night — Day 1 — Facs of Life
3. About the 8 plateaus of the film
4. About Saturday — Day 2 — A Cinema of Missing Bodies
5. About Deleuze video archives (Vincennes 1975-76) Through the Letterbox
6. Useful links
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1. About the 2 Days
DAY 1
What: Screening of ‘Facs of Life’ (1’ 56’’)
When: 7:00pm
Where: 16Beaver Street, 4th Floor
Who: Free and open to all
DAY 2
What: Talk / Screenings / Discussion “A Cinema of Missing Bodies”
When: 1:00pm – 5:30pm
Where: 16Beaver Street, 4th Floor
Who: Free and open to all
Over a series of two days, we will spend time with Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson and explore their effort to realize a cinema that would both be an encounter with Deleuze’s thought, as well as an encounter with the traces left of a collective process, which were the courses at Vincennes. The two days will include a screening of the film they have made with some former students, as well as a subsequent day, which will attempt to look more closely at some of the footage from the lectures, and explore an expanded version of their cinematic research/work.
We hope the two days will be a collective process for which Silvia and Graeme may contribute some questions, and which the rest of us may develop, add to, broaden, complicate, or play with.
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2. About Friday Night — Day 1 — Facs of Life
Inspired by, and making creative use of, the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, ‘Facs of Life’ (I/F/UK 2009, HDV) is a film in eight plateaus that attempts to construct a complex collective refrain of molecular trajectories in life and thought, beginning from a number of encounters: with video footage of Deleuze’s courses at Vincennes (1975-76); with several of the students who attended the seminar and who appear in these images, found 30 years later; with the woods of Vincennes where the university buildings (pulled down in 1980) once stood; with students of the new university at St Denis; and inevitably with the phantoms of revolution, both cinematic and political, that continue to haunt our desires.
The eight plateaus each fall under a key concept-word or refrain that delineates the territory of each student’s relationship to Deleuze’s thought (their angle of approach) and the nature of our encounter with them. The plateaus, while sketching a narrative of the film’s making, are designed to fold and unfold upon each other in a series of non-linear, multiple concatenations and assemblages.
The screening of the film will be presented by the directors.
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3. About the 8 plateaus of the film
Plateau 1, Inarchivé
with Marielle Burkhalter and Ali Akay, regards the video footage of Deleuze’s Vincennes courses (shot by Marielle Burkhalter in 1975-76) that triggered the desire to make the film, images never properly edited nor incorporated into an official public archive and whose existence as raw rushes in some way mirrors that of Deleuze’s pedagogy on the margins of official philosophy, engaged in an open-ended process of building concepts. Parallels emerge between the fate of the video (footage thrown in the trash on account of its technical obsolescence and only partly salvaged) and that of Vincennes as a whole, an experimental environment where Deleuze, though marginalized, could work more or less unimpeded. Yet these images, far from being ‘substandard’, present in the singularity of their texture and rhythm, a well of virtual fictions and plastic trajectories, haunted by revenance of the post-nouvelle vague diaspora (Eustache, late Bresson, the Rivette of Out 1). Thus the film begins with a detective story: the videos reactivated as surveillance images permitting us to individuate certain figures 30 years later, a process all the while problematized by the subject of the lessons themselves, ‘faciality’ as an apparatus of capture, the translation of a polyvocal body of desires into a binary machine of identification: faces, names, an information model of ‘personal’ histories and reminiscences that the film will attempt to combat through a rhizomatic movement and dispersion of impersonal singularities.
Plateau 2, Faciality
where this problem is explored through an encounter on skype (a machine of facialization) with Kuniichi Uno, a Japanese student (now scholar and translator of Deleuze), and through Deleuze’s musings on the scapegoat as ‘anti-visage’, chased into the desert for menacing the order of signification. Yet it is the fascination of images and faces that opens an Alice/Orpheus trajectory, a desire to go through the screen (through the Rear Window), efface the visage and recover the missing bodies (of the students, of Vincennes, of Deleuze’s thought, of revolutionary desire).
Plateau 3, Inclination
marks the first such attempt to reach the body of Vincennes, through an encounter with Robert Albouker, in which the present-day Bois de Vincennes becomes the virtual confluence of both its buried history and various mythic, poetic and cinematic figurations of woods as labyrinth. In the incommensurable interval between the two figures of a girl and an older man lies the question of who is the dreamer and who is being dreamed, who the revenant and who the living body. Who the possessor and who the possessed. And of the desire that permeates and modulates this suspended interval when there is nothing more to be said. Or the strange urge to stay in a place where there is nothing further to be done, echoing Deleuze’s insistence on remaining in his tiny, overcrowded Vincennes classroom, a philosopher’s act of resistance to incorporation into the power structure of university.
Plateau 4, Scales and intervals
takes up this question in musical terms. Filmed at Le Couvent de la Tourette, it follows the work of composer Pascale Criton in redistributing and remodelling bodies, voices and sounds, manipulating perception of time, space and the materiality of sound, work which the film picks up in the desire to reconfigure the body of cinema and the machine of perception it engenders. Through a trolley/chariot, the voice is carried away on a different trajectory from its organic source, permitting us to rewire our perceptual apparatus, to listen to images and see voices. Another interval addressed (across different time scales) is that between preparation and action, where Deleuze’s though is invoked both synchronically and diachronically (preparing for and rising to the challenge of the sound event, the place of philosophy in the work and life trajectory of a composer).
Plateau 5, Borders
with Anne Querrien, Richard Pinhas. Olivier Apprill and Abel Mir, returns to the political question of the downscaling and standardization of education as a ‘preparation’ for life, and to the borders where life goes on being invented, perceived from the outside as a kind of noise, the noise of what tries to tear away from the axiomatized regime of capitalism, the noise of what is torn by capital from the endless process of its becoming and offered as an end product to be ingested and surpassed. Thus we pass from the corridors and dazebao of Paris 8 Saint Denis, torn between rallying calls of resistance on one hand and new forms of enslavement on the other, to the Paris Peripherique where a lone figure, distant cousin of Tati’s M. Hulot, reads sections of Anti-Oedipus to the passing traffic, to a concert of noise music where sounds are shredded and these ‘tears’ of eros invent their own fleeting jouissance; and finally to a threshold image where the poetry of Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring machines and the sweeping roar of automobiles are disjunctively synthesised in the glissandi of a black trombone playing a composition by Criton.
Plateau 6, Epuissance
with photographer Yolande Finkelstaijn returns to the question of the border as what is left by the wayside. Here a bestiary of animal bodies crushed by cars, are pressed into unforeseen shapes of desire at the moment of death. A reading of Beckett’s Mal Vu Mal Dit evokes the figure of the exhausted, the idea of exhausting the possibilities of what is (les choses sont là), the opening to a life after life which takes us back to Paris 8 Saint Denis and a quartet of present-day students framed after Godard/Gorin’s Un Film Comme les Autres, after the motor of militant discourse has been exhausted and what remains are echoes of its gestures combined with the uncertainty and fragility of the present, a conversation that turns around a micropolitics of resistance and autonomy, while a girl reads from Ponge’s La Fabrique du pré on the nature of fire and organic life.
Plateau 7, Promenade
with Giorgio Passerone, follows from this as the possibility of a horizon, the perception of an ‘outside’ that nonetheless returns us to the world and to a desire to give this outside tangible, material form within it, taking a short walk (under the sign of Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway) composed of molecular perceptions from Montmartre to Deleuze’s apartment in Rue Bizerte.
Plateau 8 Falaise
with Georges Comtesse, takes up the question of the horizon of thought, the violence which comes from thought’s ‘outside’ which forces us to think and which makes thought tear away from its existing ground, folding this question back on the apparatus of cinema, the body of the film, the viewer’s body, the rhizome that plunges us back into its maps and milieus to reconnect, and reconnect with, their immanent life which permeates and folds back upon those of the viewer.
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4. About Saturday — Day 2 — A Cinema of Missing Bodies (further concatenations and assemblages around ‘Facs of Life’)
The non-linear, rhizomatic modality of “Facs of Life” has given rise to a series of events proposing a spatial ‘redistribution’ of the film, posing the question of the limits and possible extensions of the ‘body’ of cinema.
Inarchivé: explosition d’un film, explodes the spatial and temporal frame of film spectatorship and the indeterminate intervals presupposed by montage into hodological space where dispersed fragments of the filmic process (scenes, rushes, props, interviews, archive research materials) are redistributed in a dynamic continuum with the viewer’s own lived experience.
Blown Up! A la recherche des eleves de Gilles Deleuze imagines a porous, interactive space of ‘eventwork’, a temporary autonomous classroom in which portions of the film function as a membrane in communication with planned and unplanned interventions from those present in a mobile multiplicity whose borders and dimensions continue to shift.
The day after the screening of “Facs of Life”, Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson will give a talk on these processes and on their conception of ‘exploded’ cinema. As part of the day, there will be a screening of extracts from the original archives of Deleuze’s lessons at Vincennes shot by militant filmmaker Marielle Burkhalter. This rarely seen archive video together with a number of documents relating to the foundation of Vincennes will serve as a platform for a discussion on current education reforms and possibilities of resistance and autonomy.
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5. About Deleuze video archives 1975-76 : “Through the Letterbox”
“I don’t think there can be any greater joy than that of thinking”
(Roberto Rossellini, My method)
Unedited video of Gilles Deleuze’s courses at Vincennes was first broadcast in 2006 by an art cinema platform «Fuori Orario» (directed by enrico ghezzi) in its after hours slot on the Italian TV channel RAI TRE with repeat transmissions in the following years. The video, mostly shot by Marielle Burkhalter in 1975-76 as part of her Masters project to ‘film philosophy,’ originally incorporated also the lessons of Jean Francois Lyotard, René Scherer and François Chatelet. It was Deleuze’s aim to edit the material shot during his own seminar into a finished ‘film’ though he was finally unable to secure adequate funding and post-production resources to complete the project, which was screened only once in a Paris cinema, before disappearing completely from view.
For a number of reasons Burkhalter’s images languished in obscurity for decades, and were at one point almost lost completely, until the «Fuori Orario» broadcast exposed some 20 hours of rushes to the jittery light of after-midnight insomnia and delirium. Deemed irrecuperable and barely presentable on account of its apparent technical defects, Burkhalter’s video constitutes a curious object, surviving, in the manner of an audio-visual jotter, in the limbo between private memoir and historical archive. What would have become of the ‘film’ Deleuze hoped to make from these images is anyone’s guess.
“Through the Letterbox” presents extended extracts of the original video footage of Deleuze’s courses refilmed and reframed in 16/9 HD letterbox format, as a problematic confluence of cinema and television pedagogy.
The high-tech, high definition ‘cinema’ format in which these degraded video images are presented (a fabrication which also includes the projection room itself) opens them to an alterity of virtual fictional trajectories that resituates the question of a pedagogy of the image – a question raised by Godard, Rossellini and others in their 1970s migration towards TV that at the time appeared to them a medium more open to experimentation. Here a specular, ‘unpresentable’ image of pedagogy is caught up in an improbable wide-screen cinematic becoming. By the simple means of letterbox framing, images destined, at the limit, for small-screen, small hours viewing are presented as if they were ‘cinema’, interrogating the potential implications of posting such images ‘through the letterbox’.
(a collaborative experiment in public-service projection between Graeme Thomson & Silvia Maglioni, Marielle Burkhalter and “Fuori Orario”))
This is part of a larger epistolary project. Each “letter” contains a tailor-made edit from the archives and is sent to a specific place or collective. The status of these archives is still uncertain, clandestine. After 16beaver, the next “video letter” will be to the otolith group and screened with “Facs of Life” at Tate Britain on Dec. 8th 2010.
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6. Useful links
Facs of Life site
http://facsoflife.wordpress.com
Facs of Life trailer (journal of Deleuze Studies ACTUAL VIRTUAL)
http://www.hssr.mmu.ac.uk/deleuze-studies/journal/av-10/
“Blown up !” THE TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS CLASSROOM (details and program)
http://www.mainsdoeuvres.org/article701.html
« This is night work. Meanderings around Facs of life » (dowloadable from Canadian review TRAHIR)
http://www.revuetrahir.net/numero1.html
« Mille Plateaus » by Deleuze & Guattari (downloadable)
http://www.mediafire.com/?emxdmf4dtju
La voix de Deleuze en ligne
http://www.univ-paris8.fr/deleuze/
Foucault on Vincennes University
http://www.ipt.univ-paris8.fr/hist/documents/vincennes/Foucaut-Vadrot/Foucault_70.htm
The 21 conditions of students for the foundation of Vincennes (L’Action, 5 novembre 1968)
http://www.ipt.univ-paris8.fr/hist/21cond-1.htm
Various archive videos
http://vodpod.com/lesfacsoflife/facsoflife
Chimeres
http://www.revue-chimeres.fr/
Generation on line
http://www.generation-online.org/
silvia maglioni and graeme thomson
http://cargocollective.com/terminal-beach