Screening: Mark de Valk #421
- Doors: 19:30
- Start time: 20:00
Mark de Valk - The Body as Montage: A Spectacle of Punishment
Triptych experimental (essay) docu-narrative critiquing the nature of state/military/corporate subjugation & control of the (female) body. Cinematic image reformed & re-purposed with the storyline structured by means of spatial & associational logic. Relationship of film, filmmaker & audience; the camera as ‘stylo’. Cultural notions engaged with: Michel Foucault, Elizabeth Grosz, Jean-Pierre Lefebvre, Elaine Scarry, Jean Baudrillard, Frederick Jamieson, Mary-Ann Doane.
Interweaving the lyrical, personal & political via 'Détournement, the detouring of the over-produced images of the Spectacle into a critique of itself', as inspired by Guy Debord. Interweaving of authentic topographies/geographies, history, personal memory & authorial voice.
'Our conceptions of the past are affected by the mental images we employ to solve present problems, so that collective memory is essentially a reconstruction of the past in the light of the present,memory needs continuous feeding from collective sources & is sustained by social & moral props.' (M. Halbwachs, 1877-1945)
Recent Completed Projects:
- Book • Screening the Tortured Body: The Cinema as Scaffold (Palgrave, 2016) (cinema essay collection) www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9781137399175
- Film • Picana Negra (experimental essay documentary examining topographies of state torture during Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’) - Interweaving authentic geographies, authorial voice, Human Rights advocates, female-survivor accounts, the prose of Julio Cortázar. Improvisational picture/sound editing.