Marta Mateus: Carte Blanche
Programmed by: Marta Mateus
In preparation for the filmmaker’s visit to Doc Films and her presentation of her work alongside film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, Marta Mateus has been given carte blanche to select films that have shaped her work and left a mark on the history of cinema. Marta Mateus dedicates this cycle to Jonathan Rosenbaum.
“The first ‘views’ by the Lumière brothers, evolve into the magical universe of Georges Méliès, opening — from the dawn of cinema — vast new horizons in our perception of time and space, and in the countless ways of observing and interpreting reality. The camera that becomes a magical box of imagery in Abbas Kiarostami’s ‘The Traveller’ takes flight in Manoel de Oliveira’s ‘The Strange Case of Angélica’, crossing the threshold between life and death to see what no other eye can reach. This evolving gaze transforms the encounter between spectator and film into an act of critical co-creation, as Serge Daney invites us to look with heightened awareness. Chantal Akerman’s first gestures in cinema carry the seeds of a body of work driven by a self-reflexive investigation of rhythm and narrative as a vital impulse capable of shaping our most intimate visions. Through Pedro Costa’s guidance, we enter Straub and Huillet’s darkroom, where the filmmakers’ artisanal precision distills the artistry of their labor into a tool of inquiry and analysis of the human condition. Marcel Duchamp’s spiral reels inaugurate a new path of experimentation in the moving image, later widened by Jean-Luc Godard’s radical deconstructions, which dismantle our deepest habits to reveal languages still unknown — or perhaps merely forgotten.
Film embodies a movement of thought through its very fabric. Tracing its modes of construction as a manifestation of dialectical reasoning, this cinephilic program presents the craft of cinema as a means of expanding consciousness — ultimately asserting itself as a political force for understanding ourselves and shaping community, conjuring revolution and freedom.” — Marta Mateus
Hands / The Plow That Broke the Plains / People of the Cumberland / Barbs, Wastelands (1934 / 1936 / 1937 / 2017)
Ralph Steiner, Willard Van Dyke / Pare Lorentz / Jay Leyda, Elia Kazan, Sidney Meyers / Marta Mateus · 4m / 25m / 21m / 25m · DCP / digital / DCP / DCP
Mateus pairs her first film Barbs, Wastelands, about the intergenerational transference of memory in a southern Portuguese peasant community, with three American documentary works. In Hands, the body is a site of possibility and repression in this film for the Works Progress Administration; The Plow That Broke the Plains is a Resettlement Administration documentary about the effects of the Dust Bowl on Great Plains communities; People of the Cumberland documents labor and education organizing efforts in rural Appalachia.
Introduced by Marta Mateus and Jonathan Rosenbaum.
Saturday, November 8 5:00 PM
6 Bagatelas / Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? (2001 / 2001)
Pedro Costa · 18m / 104m · DCP
In Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?, Pedro Costa films his mentors Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet in the editing room with their film Sicilia!, while they discuss their separate approaches to filmmaking. The incremental process of creation becomes a small window into their relationship: the moments of silence, and the moments of great tenderness and humor. 6 Bagatelas is a continuation, featuring six unused scenes from the preceding film.
Introduced by Marta Mateus.
Sunday, November 9 5:00 PM
The Traveler / The Strange Case of Angelica (1974 / 2010)
Abbas Kiarostami / Manoel de Oliveira · 73m / 97m · DCP / 35mm
In Abbas Kiarostami’s first feature film, determined to see a soccer match in Tehran, a young boy resorts to any means necessary to get his wish. Followed by The Strange Case of Angelica, in which a photographer is asked by a couple to take portraits of their recently deceased daughter. However, upon looking at her through the viewfinder of his camera, Angelica seems to come to life before his very eyes…
Program will be presented with a 15-minute intermission between features.
Sunday, November 16 3:00 PM
Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars / The Image Book (2023 / 2018)
Jean-Luc Godard · 20m / 88m · DCP
Reprising ideas from his other late works, Godard tackles cinema’s ethical status in light of 20th and 21st-century atrocities, centering on inadequate depictions of the Middle East in this essay-film. His historicist method takes everything as a subject of critique, constructing a mosaic that involves fragments from his early features, Arabic-language cinema, and images of Hiroshima and the Holocaust. Preceded by Phony Wars, Godard’s final finished film.
Sunday, November 23 4:00 PM
Examen d’entrée INSAS / Chantal Akerman by Chantal Akerman (1967 / 1997)
Chantal Akerman · 10m / 64m · DCP
Chantal Akerman paints an intimate self-portrait in two parts: one half a monologue to the camera, the other a montage of her past work, in which the films “speak for themselves.” Preceded by a series of short films made by Akerman as part of her entrance exam to INSAS, the performing arts institute in Brussels where she was accepted.
