ECOLOGIES OF DISAPPEARANCE: Contemporary French analog films co-presented by Dogmilk and AFW. Curated by Charlie Hewison
AFW is excited to collaborate with Dogmilk to present Ecologies of Disappearance: Contemporary French Analog Films on Loss curated by Charlie Hewison.
7pm Wednesday 23rd April (Films from 8pm)
Miscellania, 2/401 Swanston St
$15 tickets on door.
16mm and digital projection.
As Timothy Morton has been telling us over and over, ecological awareness need not simply be rooted in a will to preserve some idyllic idealized “nature”, but on the contrary should perhaps stem from the experience of disappearance itself: a “dark ecology”. The films in this programme lean into this idea. These three films are interested less in mobilizing film’s ability to faithfully reproduce the appearances of the world in order to preserve them, but in the way that analog film can evoke disappearance itself, in its very materiality. Scott MacDonald, in his seminal text from 2004, “Toward an Eco-Cinema”, wrote that the filmstrip, an intrinsically fragile medium, is especially well suited to expressing our relationship to a disappearing world, since its very materiality “embodies the struggle between permanence and transience in a way that is remarkable”. These three films take on this question in different ways. Absences, by the militant collective Ø (Ensemble vide), uses the ghostly apparitions on their homemade emulsion to forcefully evoke landscapes and bodies in danger of disappearing at the site of a proposed nuclear waste dump site. In Per Una Selva Oscura, Emmanuel Lefrant processes images of landscapes in increasingly abstract and ominous ways, reflecting on the dystopian “dark forest” to come. And finally, Frédérique Menant’s Agua de Vinagre uses 16mm images of wandering through island landscapes to reflect on the loss of a loved one: a cine-mourning.
FILMS
Absences (Ø collective, 16mm, 2017, 4mins): Somewhere in eastern France, the State is trying to sweep its nuclear waste under the rug so that it can be forgotten. People are rallying against the project and little by little, between radioactivity and the food industry, many things are being erased from memory. Under disappearing pastures, waste hidden from view radiates an invisible poison. The Ensemble Vide (Ø) collective have attempted to capture these absences on film.
Per Una Selva Oscura (Emmanuel Lefrant, 16mm & Super 8 -> digital, 2022, 8mins): The revelation of an image, which progresses to the heart of the materia, seized in an incoercible movement: that of a dystopia in progress. A primitive entity on the verge of cataclysm, an infinite flight forward, until the complete dissolution of all forms and figures. In which dark forest have we lost our way?
Agua de Vinagre (Frédérique Menant, 16mm -> digital, 2021-22, 40mins): A woman walks through island landscapes in which intimate territories of grief are being drawn. What do we make of the dead who still live within us? How do we live at the same time with and without them? How can we be present to the world with this abyss? With a sensitive, almost tactile, approach, a world is recomposed where the missing find a place beside the living, where sensuality overcomes the collapse.
Poster by Tom Jordan @t.m.ar
We acknowledge that this event will be taking place on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. We pay our respects to their elders past, present and emerging, and acknowledge that sovereignty was never ceded on these lands and seas.