Anne-Marie Miéville: Not Reconciled

Programmed by: Avivit Ashman, Hannah Yang

"Every time we enter a film by Miéville, we experience the feeling of an urgency — to separate," writes film critic Marie Anne Guerin. This attention to rupture, the gaps inherent in language, romance, and revolution, is essential to the project of Swiss filmmaker Anne-Marie Miéville. Through film — for, after all, the "desire for order is the desire for cinema" (Guerin) — Miéville works toward a reconciliation of these fissures. With a precise command of images that dates to her origins in still photography, her films are an exercise in making us see anew, as claimed by her lifelong collaborator Jean-Luc Godard. Miéville's fifty-year partnership with Godard, in which she served as actress, editor, photographer, writer, and producer in dozens of films, is one of the most remarkable in the history of cinema. Their ten-hour Six fois deux/Sur et sous la communication, and especially their 1976 documentary on Palestinian fedayeen Ici et ailleurs made with the Dziga Vertov Group, remain politically and formally incisive critiques of imperialism and mass culture. While this series showcases select Godard-Miéville collaborations, its focus is on Miéville as a filmmaker in her own right, the forger of a new cinema of self-critique and dialectical rigor. Miéville's films are marked by an acerbic wit, a Brechtian theatricality, a militant anger. They offer a unique balance of intellectual heft and a profound tenderness, drawing on a trove of past thinkers — Rilke, Joseph Conrad, Heidegger, Plato, Tolstoy — and Miéville's own life. Miéville, a "cineaste of the word" (Jacques Deniel) and of the spirit, provides a radical restructuring of relations between self and other, image and text, attempting reconciliation while acknowledging its impossibility and the beauty therein.