screening
Jean Vigo, A propos de Nice [1930]
In the sunny seaside town of Nice, wealthy tourists enjoy the luxury hotels and gambling casinos. Scarcely noticed are the local working class people who clean the streets and prepare for the town’s annual carnival. Limited financial resources more or less compelled Jean Vigo to begin his film-making
career with this short documentary film. A propos de Nice is not Vigo’s most ambitious work but it is striking how much of his own personality and view of life emerges from this short but hugely impressive work. Assisted by a very gifted camera operator, Boris Kaufman, Vigo presents a unique portrait of the town he grew to love whist convalescing from his recurring respiratory problems. A propos de Nice is not
so much a documentary about Nice, but more a brilliantly crafted assault on everything that the young debutant film-maker Jean Vigo hated. It is witty, it is charming, but it is also dangerously subversive.
Sarah Morris, Miami [2002]
Miami is the fourth film by artist Sarah Morris. Operating between a documentary, the biography of a city and a form of non-narrative fiction, Miami shifts between sites of production, leisure and work. The Coca-Cola bottling plant, the Grand Prix and the hotels of Morris Lapidus are just a few of the places that
interweave in a driving sequence of urban images that combine towards a new ultra-vision of a place.
Sarah Morris, Los Angeles [2004]
Los Angeles is a short film to be seen in a museum and gallery context. It follows on from Morris´ earlier abstract city portraits. A sequence of images of a place set to a pulsing sound-track Los Angeles attempts to catch the varied layers of a complex metropolis without comment or narration.
Sarah Morris’ fifth film continues her investigation into the psychology, architecture and aesthetic of the American city. It reveals a new cityscape of Los Angeles by tracking its de-centered plan, its complex architecture, and most importantly its crucial role as a center of image production. Los Angeles is a film about contemporary commercial film-making, following the production and direction of a movie in an abstract sense. It also tracks various pre and post-production processes in order to create a sweeping non-narrated image of the mechanisms of film-making and how they relate to the identity of a place.
introduced by David Kulhánek
total lenght: 76 min.
in collaboration with: Sarah Morris Studio, Institut Francais de Prague a Display