Film exhibitions
The Truth Game:
The Documentaries of Peter Watkins
2012
curated by: Laura Faerman
production: VU
The showcase “The Truth Game – The Documentaries of Peter Watkins” presented for the first time in Brazil ten documentary films by the British filmmaker, critic, and theorist Peter Watkins. Watkins is one of the pioneers of the docudrama genre, a style of documentary that dramatically reconstructs events using actors.
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The film series was free to the public and took place at Caixa Cultural São Paulo.
Introduction
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The exhibition “The Truth Game – The Documentaries of Peter Watkins” invites debate through the screening of documentary films about the thought of British filmmaker, critic, and theorist Peter Watkins.
Since the mid-1960s, Watkins has developed, through his films and production methods, a critical theory regarding the role and influence of television media and the use of cinema to construct false beliefs and truths. According to Watkins, “...in the vast majority of cases, society consistently refuses to recognize the form and process of dissemination and reception of audiovisual mass media productions. This means that the language forms structuring the messages of films or TV programs, as well as all (hierarchical or other) processes of dissemination to the public, are completely ignored and not subject to debate.”
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Peter Watkins’s entire body of work is divided between critical essays and films produced for cinema and television. These works present themselves as essays (in documentary form) about decisive moments in history, structured to place the viewer at the center of the debate. Historical events and characters are seen through the lens of television news and filmed documents. Thus, it is up to the audience to reflect and consider whether a truth about the facts could or even can exist. The cycle “The Truth Game – The Documentaries of Peter Watkins” features the following works: The Diary of an Unknown Soldier (1959, England), The Forgotten Faces (1961, England), Culloden (1964, England), The War Game (1965, England), Privilege (1967, England), The Gladiators (1969, Sweden), Punishment Park (1971, England), Edvard Munch (1973, Sweden and Scandinavia), Evening Land (1977, Denmark), and The Freethinker (1994, Sweden).
Born in 1935, Peter Watkins made Culloden, his first feature film, in 1964. In this work, he began his project to create cinema that places at the center of the debate the very nature of the medium and genre, its modes of production, and its “contract with the viewer”: the idea that a documentary serves to summarize and present a truth about a specific event or person.
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Thus, in Culloden (about a battle that took place in Scotland in 1746, when English regiments massacred members of Scottish clans, resulting in 2,500 deaths), Watkins filmed with amateur English and Scottish actors, thus assembling his troops. Many were direct descendants of 18th-century soldiers. Creating a kind of time trick, the viewer sees interviews with the soldiers as if in a television news report where the camera and reporter are on the battlefield, broadcasting a “truth” to the world. This technique echoed images of the Vietnam War and how it was presented to the television audience.
This research into a new form—a fictional documentation that finds truth through its production (the soldier-descendants)—continues in his following projects. The War Game (1968) is a fake news broadcast reporting a war between Western and Soviet troops and uses archival footage of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions.
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The process evolves, and Watkins creates a new genre: documentaries about the future. Again, amateur actors (with some connection to what is shown) perform a fiction that simultaneously comments on a present situation. With The Gladiators, filmed during the 1968 European uprisings, Watkins depicts a world where, to contain social aggression, governments decide to create gladiator games similar to those in the Roman Empire. In Punishment Park (1970), another documentary about the future—based on the repressive and militaristic policies of Richard Nixon’s government—a penal colony in California is shown, where all youth who challenge the established order are sent.
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Three years after Punishment Park, Peter Watkins reworks the documentary genre again, presenting another possibility. Edvard Munch returns to his basic procedures: a documentary about the past filmed with a present format and amateur actors connected to the event; here, the life of the Norwegian painter and his dramas in morally conservative early-20th-century Scandinavia. The film also serves as a kind of autobiography of Watkins, who identifies with Munch’s struggles as if both had shared the same experience.
The Truth Game – The Documentaries of Peter Watkins offers Brazilian audiences privileged access to one of the most inventive and engaged filmmakers of the century, responsible for creating and formulating a critique of the universe of images that, now, with new technologies and modes of image circulation, gains renewed and powerful strength.
2011​
Contemporary Japanese Cinema: Nobuhiro Suwa
production: VU
curated by: Daniela Castro
“Contemporary Japanese Cinema: Nobuhiro Suwa” screened four feature films by the independent director born in Hiroshima, one of the most acclaimed experimental filmmakers in Japan today.
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The showcase was held at Caixa Cultural Rio de Janeiro.
Quay Brothers
2010​
production: VU
curated by: Silvia Hayashi
Held at Caixa Cultural São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Brasilia
The Quay Brothers showcase presents Brazilian audiences with a retrospective of fifteen short films and two feature-length films directed by animators Stephen and Timothy Quay.
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Identical twins, Stephen and Timothy Quay have created a cult cinematic body of work over the past 30 years, based on miniature models filmed using stop-motion animation.
Born in 1947 in Pennsylvania, USA, the Quays studied illustration at the Philadelphia College of Art. In the early 1970s, they moved to England and completed their studies at the Royal College of Art, where they made their first animated films. There, they met producer Keith Griffiths, with whom they founded a small production company, Atelier Koninck, based in London.
Influenced by the traditional Eastern European animation school, the Quays are filmmakers passionate about detail and the control of color and texture which, combined with a highly particular use of focus and camera movements, make their films unique and instantly recognizable.
In 1986, they created the short film Street of Crocodiles, a classic of animation cinema, considered by filmmaker Terry Gilliam as one of the ten best animated films of all time. In 1998, they made Institute Benjamenta, their debut live-action feature film.
The Quay Brothers’ work also includes music videos for His Name Is Alive, Michael Penn, Sparklehorse, 16 Horsepower, and Peter Gabriel—including the award-winning video for the song “Sledgehammer”—and opera set designs. In 1998, they were nominated for a Tony Award for the sets of Eugene Ionesco’s play The Chairs, presented on Broadway that same year.
In 2000, they created the award-winning short film In Absentia in collaboration with composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. In 2003, they directed four short films in collaboration with composer Steve Martland for a live event held at the Tate Modern museum in London. The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, the Quay Brothers’ second live-action feature film, was released in 2005.
Gender Politics
American Cinema of the 1970s
The exhibition “Gender Politics – American Cinema of the 1970s” offers an exploration of the political use of genre cinema within the American film industry through the screening of 14 films made between the late 1960s and the mid-1970s within the Hollywood production system. This period was marked by a shift in the citizen’s relationship with official power institutions following the ideological radicalization in the country during the Vietnam War years, culminating in President Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974.
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In this context, the major studios faced a crisis in their model, which opened the door for various attempts to build politically engaged cinema using genres (crime, thriller, comedy, drama) to express the emotional state of a new America. Oscillating between auteur-driven and clearly industrial works, Gender Politics focuses on the films of directors such as Alan J. Pakula, Milos Forman, Paul Mazursky, and Robert Altman, among others, creating a significant snapshot of the political, aesthetic, and psychological imagination of a decisive moment in the construction of a cinematic language.
Link to the interview published in the catalogue
2010​
production: VU
curated by: Laura Faerman
Held at Caixa Cultural São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro
The Cinema of Maya Deren
2009
curated by: Silvia Hayashi, Laura Faerman
production: VU
The exhibition presented the complete filmography of Maya Deren, one of the most important filmmakers of the American avant-garde.
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An icon of American independent cinema—filmmaker, dancer, writer, poet, choreographer, theorist, and photographer—Maya Deren began her pioneering career alongside artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray and founded American experimental cinema, which influenced the entire postwar film culture.
Deren’s work was fundamental for a whole generation of independent filmmakers like Kenneth Anger, Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage, and Michael Snow, as well as contemporary artists such as Cindy Sherman. She produced her work against the currents of Hollywood, ultimately influencing the industry itself, which incorporated elements of her work into productions by celebrated filmmakers such as David Lynch, M. Night Shyamalan, and Alejandro Jodorowsky.
The program, screened at Caixa Cultural Rio de Janeiro (March 10–15, 2009) and Caixa Cultural São Paulo (April 8–12, 2009), featured six short films and a 52-minute documentary, representing the entirety of Maya Deren’s cinematic output.
link to catalogue text about Maya Deren's work