ISSUE
15.12.2021
EN

Sur la terre / Au fond du cœur

On the Earth / At the Bottom of the Heart

COMPILED BY Nicole Brenez, Gerard-Jan Claes
ARTICLE
Violeta Kovacsics, 2020
Nicole Brenez – Investigating the Movement
ARTICLE
Nicole Brenez, 2004
T.W. Adorno: Cinema in Spite of Itself – But Cinema all the Same
ARTICLE
Nicole Brenez, 2004
Forms 1960-2004

“For It Is the Critical Faculty That Invents Fresh Forms” (Oscar Wilde)

ARTICLE
Nicole Brenez, 2013
René Vautier: Duties, Rights and Passion of Images
ARTICLE
Nicole Brenez, 2008
Harun Farocki and the Romantic Genesis of the Principle of Visual Critique
ARTICLE
Nicole Brenez, 2011
A Picture of Us

X+ by Marylène Negro

ARTICLE
Nicole Brenez, 2011
Political Cinema Today

The New Exigencies: For a Republic of Images

ARTICLE
Nicole Brenez, 2021
Women in Window

The House Is Black by Forugh Farrokhzad

ARTICLE
Nicole Brenez, 2012
Mimesis 2

Correspondence Between Jonas Mekas and José Luis Guérin

Sur la terre.

À la même heure, dans toutes les villes du monde, la foule qui sort des cinémas, qui se répand dans les rues comme un sang noir, qui, comme une bête puissante, allonge ses mille tentacules, et d’un tout petit effort écrase les palais, les prisons.

 

Au fond du cœur.

Regardez les générations nouvelles pousser soudainement comme des fleurs. Révolution. Jeunesse du monde. Aujourd’hui.

 

Blaise Cendrars, L’ABC du Cinéma, 1921

  

*

 

 

On the Earth.

At the same hour, in all the cities of the world, the crowd leaving the cinemas, spreading in the streets like black blood, stretching out its myriad tentacles like a mighty beast, crushes palaces and prisons with the slightest effort.

 

At the Bottom of the Heart.

Watch the new generations suddenly grow like flowers. Revolution. Youth of the world. Today.

 

Blaise Cendrars, The ABC of Cinema, 1921

 

 

In 2018, by analogy with similar initiatives in other art forms, Sabzian created a new yearly tradition: Sabzian invites a guest to write a State of Cinema and to choose a film that connects to it. This way, once a year, the art of film is held against the light: a speech that challenges cinema, calls it to account, points the way or refuses to define it, puts it to the test and on the line, summons or embraces it, praises or curses it. A plea, a declaration, a manifest, a programme, a testimony, a letter, an apologia or maybe even an indictment. In any case, a call to think about what cinema means, could mean or should mean today. For the 2021 edition, Sabzian is delighted to welcome the French film historian, scholar and curator Nicole Brenez. She chose the film A.I. at War (2021), in which filmmaker Florent Marcie confronts Sota, an AI robot, with the tragedy of mankind in the war zones of Mosul and Raqqa, then in Paris during the Yellow Vests uprising.

On the occasion of the State of Cinema 2021, held by Nicole Brenez on 23 December 2021, Sabzian presents a small Dossier on the French film historian, scholar and curator, compiled in dialogue with Brenez herself. This compilation comprises texts on Theodor W. Adorno’s view on cinema, Harun Farocki, Marylène Negro, The House Is Black by Forough Farrokhzad, on the filmic correspondence between Jonas Mekas and José Luis Guérin, a keynote speech on the state of political cinema today, and an exclusive English translation of Brenez’s piece on René Vautier. Brenez’s texts are preceded by an introduction by Violeta Kovacsics.

On Thursday 23 December, Nicole Brenez’s State of Cinema, titled ‘Projections. Provisoires. Provisions’, will be streamed on Sabzian.be.

Texts

Violeta Kovacsics, 2020
ARTICLE
15.12.2021
EN

Nicole Brenez is an essential figure in film criticism and contemporary cinema studies. Her analytical and passionate approach to cinema, emerging from her extraordinary creative freedom, has earned her the respect and admiration of critics all over the world. Her widely followed work has never ceased to highlight the exciting challenges of engaged cinema, the kind that commits to artistic investigation as well as to the urgent social and political issues that concern us all.

Nicole Brenez, 2004
ARTICLE
15.12.2021
EN

Few theorists have been as critical of cinema as T.W. Adorno. Critical in this context implies all of the following: methodical, negative and subtle. … For [Adorno], cinema and popular or popularised music … were emblematic of how works of art had become commodified cultural products. A cultural “commodity” represents simultaneously the means of a confiscation, a mode of corruption, a simulacrum, and a sort of formal joke. … [C]inema, which arose out of techniques of recording and whose primary goal is reproduction organised into an industry, appears from the start as a powerful instrument of domination, propaganda and falsification. Adorno’s achievement consists in his having furnished us with instruments for understanding ideology as much as for defining the concept of art.

“For It Is the Critical Faculty That Invents Fresh Forms” (Oscar Wilde)

Nicole Brenez, 2004
ARTICLE
15.12.2021
EN

With a few remarkable exceptions (Jean Mitry, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Noel Burch ...), the history of cinema has mainly been recounted from the industry’s point of view. May this contribution to a history of forms help us to escape such a dominant ideology and reconsider the works and the artists from a different perspective. Today the violence of the cultural industry is so cynically triumphant that it is possible to establish a law of inverse proportions between the social visibility of a film and its real eminence. 

Nicole Brenez, 2013
ARTICLE
15.12.2021
EN

Every film by René Vautier constitutes a pamphlet, a shield for the oppressed and the victims of history, a little war machine for justice. And like weapons in an underground cell, these films serve, are donated, exchanged, lent, thrown away, destroyed, lost, or hidden and sometimes forgotten in their hideout for a long time. In this regard, every work by René Vautier constitutes a special case, an episode in probably the most novelistic story in the history of cinema. Full of scars though they might be, these films are of a real beauty, not only in the aesthetic and stylistic sense, but in the sense of a cinema elevated to the plenitude of its necessity and its powers. 

Nicole Brenez, 2008
ARTICLE
15.12.2021
EN

Harun Farocki, in all his works, elaborates and un folds an intensive and meditated form of encounter that we have named “visual study”. What is visual study? It is a matter of a frontal encounter, a face-to-face encounter between an existing image and a figurative project dedicated to observing It – in other words, a study of the image by means of the image itself.

X+ by Marylène Negro

Nicole Brenez, 2011
ARTICLE
15.12.2021
EN

In 2010, with the full-length film X+, Marylène Negro takes up a new dimension of human experience: the collectivity. “A Picture of Us”. What are the aggregating forces that bring forth this drive – brusque or slow, woven from facts, simplifications and resonances that we call, always approximately, collective history? Unendlessly, the cinema records silhouettes, groups, crowds, masses – fleeting passers-by of a period they are going through, tiny extras of a zeitgeist that carries them along.

The New Exigencies: For a Republic of Images

Nicole Brenez, 2011
ARTICLE
15.12.2021
EN

I wish to question what could be an internationalism for today, in the field of cinema – a critical internationalism that defies the powers of state, nation, administration and global economy. Almost all the examples I will cite are provided by filmmakers who are trying to help, through images, people other than their own. Thanks to the films themselves, it seems possible to consider, even very briefly, new proposals concerning the conception of history; the conception of the history of cinema; of an oeuvre; of the filmmaker; of political forms; of curating; and, finally, of spectatorship.

The House Is Black by Forugh Farrokhzad

Nicole Brenez, 2021
ARTICLE
15.12.2021
EN

Forugh Farrokhzad has never made a film nor led a team before. But she transforms all of these constraints, of this collective and intimate suffering, into a blaze of intelligence, despair and love in the fire of which a unique visual poem has been forged.

Correspondence Between Jonas Mekas and José Luis Guérin

Nicole Brenez, 2012
ARTICLE
15.12.2021
EN

Between 2010 and 2011, the filmmakers and artists José Luis Guérin and Jonas Mekas exchanged nine video letters as the result of an initiative of Jordi Balló. The result was a feature-length film of infinite tenderness, assembling a personal diary, travelogues and key reflections about images. Existential cinephilia, poetic horizons, artistic kinship, elegiac sensibility, a community of views, radicalness, autonomy, all these things bring together these two “friends in cinema” (as Jonas Mekas puts it), whose respective works are characterised by the renewal of descriptive forms and the challenges of observation.