We live in the era which could be characterized by the weakening sense of history and diminishing abilities to imagine any radical alternative. And if postmodernism and neoliberalism came to compensate for the political failure of the 1960s, then the question of Utopia is the only great test left of our ability to envision significant changes. Lisbon & Sintra Film Festival deemed it essential to dedicate part of programming to the search of utopian impulses throughout history of cinema.
Long Version:
Utopia in its essence is an eschatological idea that shatters the construct of reality prompting the belief in irreversibility of any major shifts, and thus in reality’s capacity to contain the bright futures. It’s driven by the strive for a better world and helps us to recognize the necessity of our implication for it to come to fruition.
In addition to helping us understand our reality by displacing us from it, utopia awakens a sentiment of needing to be, of responsibility and can guide the audience to be more than mere automata operated by powerful forces wanting to realize its ideology. Keeping in mind the potentially populist nature of cinema and how utopic visions were used for justifying repressions we believe that cinema still can be a vehicle for utopia, not only in the choice of the themes of a given film - but in its existence in its own right.
But can we really imagine the future? Can we picture a completely different world? Fredric Jameson, by far the most persistent contemporary scholar of utopia, states that any attempts to represent utopia in narrative forms are destined to fail. Utopian visions always indicate its own limits and hidden fundamentals, in the process revealing contradictions of the era that birthed them. Therefore utopia as a narrative functions not as means to imagine a better tomorrow, but on the contrary, as a way to highlight our sheer disability to do so. That’s why our program is almost devoid of cinematic utopias in the traditional sense. And a few of these that sneaked in don’t deal in political statements or literal guides to action. That would be a couple of Soviet films to be screened in Portugal for the first time ever - First Russians from 1967 and a recently restored version of Fragment of an Empire from 1929 - and an utopian reenactment Winstanley by Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo. Instead of highlighting utopia as a subject, we aimed, after Jameson, to traverse the history of cinema in search of manifold utopian impulses able to provoke and support the desire of changes. Genuine utopia is a functioning promising machine, producing hope for different future without giving out any guarantees for its arrival.
Highlights of political cinema of 70s such as Torre Bela or Peasants of the Second Fortress by Shinsuke Ogawa should not be seen in this context as political projects. More important is that they dreamed of erasing the borders between cinema and action, representation and emancipation, filmmaking and resistance — at least in terms of cinematic language and methods. Sylvain George who will be premiering in Portugal his latest film Paris est une fête continues this tradition by converging poetic and political in his view of contemporary Europe; one of his aims is to disclose Walter Benjamin’s “weak messianic power to which the past has a claim”. Marc Karlin, the great film essayist still to be discovered, was one of the artists witnessing wrecks of utopias on the coasts of geopolitical struggles. Not being able to escape the unavoidable they could save utopias by contouring its’ shapes. Others like Artur Aristakisyan and Jose Val del Omar, unique and incomparable visionaries of cinema, were trying to transcend material reality and to unearth, by means of film, camera and sound the hidden sacred meanings and dimensions, to transform perspectives.
Cinema as an instrument for supporting status quo through false and escapist representation is confronted in our program by diverse attempts at liberated medium - such as the Black Audio Film Collective’s reimagining of political documentary form in Seven Songs for Malcolm X or Lizzie Borden’s quasi-documentary science fiction dismantling in Born in Flames. Inescapable politics of personal, of artistic, of generational dissent come to the forefront through utopian deconstruction and reassemblement of cinema in Larry Clark’s Passing Through and Djibril Diop Mambety’s Touki Bouki. Belief in utopian potential of digital technologies and Internet would be represented in our program by works of Harun Farocki, Chris Marker and Bruno Sukrow.
The great desire called Utopia is not the one that can be actually fulfilled without becoming another act of consumption or delusion. Even the most dearly fantasized utopian visions are always marked by failure which does not mean we should be defeatist. This dissatisfaction reveals our need to imagine forms of gratification inherent in the very confrontation with the impossible. And who said that cinema still cannot be one?
Curators:
Alexey Artamonov
Denis Ruzaev
Ines Branco López
Screenings:
Torre Bela, Thomas Harlan (1975)
Fragment of an Empire, Fridrikh Ermler (1929)
Scenes for a Revolution, Marc Karlin (1991)
Palms, Artur Aristakisyan (1993)
First Russians, Evgeny Schiffers (1967)
Seven Songs for Malcolm X, John Akomfrah (1993)
Born in Flames, Lizzie Borden (1983)
Passing Through, Larry Clark (1977)
Ouvroir, Chris Marker (2010)
The Artist in the Circus Dome: Clueless, Alexander Kluge (1968)
Fire in Castilla, José Val del Omar (1960)
Water-Mirror of Granada, José Val del Omar (1955)
Galician Caress, José Val del Omar (1995)
Narita: The Peasants of the Second Fortress, Shinsuke Ogowa (1971)
Paralel I, Harun Farocki (2012)
Paris est une fête, Sylvain George (2017)
Winstanley, Kevin Brownlow, Andrew Mollo (1975)
Dreams are colder than Death, Arthur Jafa (2014)
Touki Bouki, Djibril Diop Mambéty (1973)
Running Fence, Albert Maysles, David Maysles (1977)
Sullivan's Travels, Preston Sturges (1941)
In latitudes of the future, Marcelo Felix (2017)
Anna, Bruno Sukrow (2014)