Cleansing the Temple: Working with Outtakes, Screen and Camera Tests
I’m going to be talking about words, images and sounds, or rather the relationships between them, their associations and connections, in both time and space. During the last seven years, I’ve been working with approximately six hours of raw, unedited material from a Soviet era Armenian film. I’m not going to be talking about Sergei Parajanov, the director of The Colour of Pomegranates (1969). Instead, I’m concerned with the raw material itself, and the ways of working with it digitally. How this fits into Wild Pop, is a moot point: Parajanov’s imagery has infiltrated the corporate mainstream, thanks in no small part to Tarsem Singh, director of Lady Gaga’s 911 video. If, as the call for papers suggests, corporate interests promote and reinforce world views, attitudes and politics that improve the conditions for those interests, then this project, I hope, explores some alternatives. Specifically, relationships between poetry and performance, painting and poetry, cinema and painting, analogue and digital.
I devised Temple of Cinema #1: Sayat Nova Outtakes, iterations of which have been presented at International Film Festival Rotterdam, the abandoned Kino Rossiya (Yerevan), Sydney Biennale, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), UNESCO (Paris), Fabrica (Brighton), Maxim Gorki Theater (Berlin) and Södertälje konsthall. Works derived from this project have appeared in The Guardian and MUBI Notebook. I collaborated with Cineteca di Bologna on restorations of The Colour of Pomegranates, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors and The Fall of Otrar as part of the World Cinema Project, part of the Film Foundation. Together with Olena Honcharuk and Cecilia Cencerelli, I curated Ukrainian Rhapsody at Il Cinema Ritrovato. I have also worked with Film at Lincoln Center, MoMA, Smithsonian Institution, Centre Pompidou, La Cinémathèque Française, Fondation Cartier, BFI, Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Asian Film Archive, Swedish Film Institute etc. I have licensed documentaries and scripted commentaries for the Criterion Collection and regularly consult for Second Sight Films.
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