Film Undone – Elements of a Latent Cinema
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
Film Undone – Elements of a Latent Cinema convenes artists, filmmakers, curators, researchers, and archivists to present and discuss unmade and unfinished film projects, film ideas realised in non-filmic media, as well as films that remained unseen in their intended form and at their intended time. An initial event in Berlin in 2023 and a book published in 2024 gathered tentative and careful probes dedicated to singular projects reflecting the importance of primary materials before and beyond the film.
Latency prompts us to think differently about what has remained invisible in cinema than under deficit-centred categories like failure, loss, or incompletion. It marks a sustained potentiality for things to change their condition, to affect us and put us in motion. During the London iteration of Film Undone, adaptations of previously presented and new contributions will map out a variety of approaches of detecting and restoring such potentiality.
The programme aims to open a space to consider cases from various political geographies and historical moments in relation to each other. In a joint roundtable, invited contributors and local respondents will discuss the spatiotemporal vectors of a latent cinema: Where do we encounter its traces and how do actualisations of unconcluded processes trouble our understanding of their pastness?
–Philip Widmann
Film Undone – Elements of a Latent Cinema is curated by Philip Widmann, and features contributions from Alejandro Alvarado, Concha Barquero, George Clark, Olexii Kuchanskyi, Léa Morin, Bunga Siagian and Mathilde Rouxel. Organised in partnership by Open City Documentary Festival, Goethe-Institut London, Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image and ICA.
PROGRAMME 2: Sat 7 December, 11am – 6pm. Birkbeck Cinema
Film Undone continues at the Birkbeck Cinema with presentations and a round table discussion. Please find a schedule below followed by summaries of the four presentations and the round table. Please book your ticket for the screening of Rocio separately.
11am – 12pm: Bunga Siagian and George Clark: Resurrecting Karmapala
Artists Bunga Siagian and George Clark will present material toward the rebirth of Karmapala and the legacy of Indonesian director Bachtiar Siagian (1923-2002). Bachtiar Siagian was due to make his ambitious film Karmapala when the anti-communist purges of 1965 made its production impossible. Their presentation will draw on script fragments and personal correspondences to address the dead through film in order to chart the possible afterlives of Karmapala from the way it has lived through the memory of film critic Krishna Sen to its unintentional resurrection in a 2002 Indonesian television series.
12pm – 1pm Mathilde Rouxel: Multiple trajectories of memory: Joumana, an unfinished film project by Jocelyne Saab
Jocelyne Saab (1948–2019) left behind some fifteen uncompleted film projects, amongst which Joumana holds a particularly special place. Conceived at the turn of the 2000s, Joumana marked the first – and only – time since the 1980s that Saab had planned to shoot a documentary in Lebanon. The film was to be centred on Saab's former classmate, Joumana, who in 1989 was caught in an explosion directed against her husband and subsequently fell into a coma. When Saab recontacted her a few years later she found that Joumana was suffering from amnesia. Troubled by this discovery, Saab proposed to make a film which in its process could help bring back her memory. Through the film, Saab wanted to raise questions of political commitment and communal violence, memory and the writing of a collective history during the Lebanese civil war.
The film still resonates terribly today, revealing the complexity surrounding the discussion of the war that tore both the filmmaker's and the lead character's lives apart. 25 years on, 5 years after the filmmaker's death, and in light of the succession of disasters facing Lebanon in the current moment, how can we (re)bring the archives of this film to life? Beginning with an exploration of the project's remaining materials, Mathilde Rouxel will trace the possible trajectories of an archive of this unfinished film. She will also examine the specific context of such an archive, which has not yet been registered in an institution, and which to this day primarily inspires and interests those close to the subject or the filmmaker. What potential does this proximity open up for the reactivation of this project, and how can we ensure the survival of a film that never was?
2pm – 3pm Olexii Kuchanskyi: Cinema That Thinks and kinotron, "the Cyclical Creative Organism"
"The mystery of the cinema hall," a trance-like collective immersion of thinking and sensing driven by sequenced images, became of great interest to a group of Kyivian filmmakers in the post-Stalin era. This film movement, the Kyiv School of Popular Science Film (1960s–1970s), treated educational film as an opportunity to practically overcome the body-mind split by a "cinema that thinks": a pedagogical process that would integrate involuntary bodily responses in the motion of images. Exploring the Kyiv School's experimentations limited by Soviet authorities, this talk examines the movement's subversive re-engagement with Vsevolod Pudovkin's application of reflexology to cinema from the 1920s and Sergei Eisenstein's montage-oriented gnoseology of "sensuous thinking." By centering on the rejected project of institutional reorganisation, "kinotron," it speculates about the course that a non-metropolitan socialist filmmaking could have taken, if not for the USSR's colonial centralisation of moving image and knowledge production.
3pm – 4pm Concha Barquero and Alejandro Alvarado: Between the Scars and the Resistance: Fabulating About Ruiz Vergara's Unmade Films
The censorship of the documentary Rocío was the beginning of a thwarted career. The Andalusian filmmaker Fernando Ruiz Vergara never directed a film again. Rocío had been seized and judicially censored immediately after Spain's transition to democracy for exposing one of the perpetrators of fascist crimes in the Civil War. The film has been banned from being shown in its entirety in Spain until today. Vergara died in 2011, leaving behind numerous scripts and sketches for films that he was never able to carry out. These films existed in the imagination and in desire, they speak of creative forces and dissidence. Recovering the Andalusian director's unfinished films is a project of research, artistic reinterpretation and affection.
Filmmakers and researchers Concha Barquero and Alejandro Alvarado invite the audience to learn about the different versions of Rocío, emphasising the results of the clash between censorship and the persistent resistance of its author, in order to explore the filmmaker's unfinished filmography. Various evidence and traces (footage, documents, but also blanks) will allow us to fabulate about the potentiality of his unmade films. Vergara's first film Otelo a presidente intended to disseminate the political project of the famous leader of the Carnation Revolution, Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho, who had wanted to establish a participatory democracy in Portugal. Both failed projects, the political and the cinematographic, bring us back to a Southern Europe devoted to an extractive economic model based on tourism as a livelihood.
4.30 – 6pm Roundtable: When and Where Is a Latent Cinema?
Alejandro Alvarado, Concha Barquero, George Clark, Olexii Kuchanskyi, Léa Morin, Mathilde Rouxel, and Philip Widmann in conversation with Erica Carter (King's College)
TIME TABLE: Saturday 7 December, Birkbeck Cinema
11am – 12pm: Resurrecting 'Karmapala'
12pm – 1pm: Multiple trajectories of memory: Joumana, an unfinished film project by Jocelyne Saab
1pm – 2pm: Lunch Break
2pm – 3pm: Cinema That Thinks and kinotron, "the Cyclical Creative Organism"
3pm – 4pm: Between the Scars and the Resistance: Fabulating About Ruiz Vergara's Unmade Films
4pm – 4.30pm: Break
4.30 pm – 6pm: Roundtable: When and Where Is a Latent Cinema?
Contact name:
Matthew Barrington