The Rencontres Internationales Paris-Berlin and the singularity of the moving image
“Queer Landscapes”, by Wojciech Pus, presented at the Rencontres Internationales Paris-Berlin 2021. © RIPB 2021
Text by: Siegfried Forster Follow
5 mins
It is the great rendezvous of the moving image, between cinema and contemporary art, live and online from the Louvre auditorium in Paris.
The American icon Laurie Anderson will take the floor this Saturday, February 27, followed by the Thai and Palme d'Or Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
In total, the Rencontres Internationales Paris-Berlin (RIPB) offers 122 works from 39 countries, 90% of which have French, European and international premieres.
Interview with the founder and co-director Jean-François Rettig.
Publicity
Read more
RFI
: Why are the Rencontres Internationales Paris-Berlin considered a unique platform in Europe
?
Jean-François Rettig
:
Perhaps, because there is a cruel lack of dissemination spaces for these contemporary practices of the moving image.
The other point is that this is not a film festival, but an event with an essential cultural vocation to address audiences.
The dimension of words, meetings and exchanges play a determining role.
Moving images are at the heart of the Rencontres. You place a lot of emphasis on hybrid spaces. What is for you the most important novelty or surprise of this 2021 edition
?
From the angle of the general context and the consequences on cultural places, it is like a response to this context: a hybrid event with a program presented live from the Louvre auditorium, with some artists present in Paris and others. remotely.
In this hybrid format, there is also an immersive 3D space where, in real time, the works are available and broadcast.
There is this extraordinary work which required the involvement of around thirty people in the Louvre auditorium to digitize and scan the spaces, to take pictures of the intermediate spaces to make them photogrammetry work.
The idea is to create barely perceptible atmospheric events, so that these interventions reach the viewer online and relate to the works shown in that space.
So, the biggest novelty is this desire for online experimentation with this immersive 3D space.
We want to show that it is possible to create the conditions for a common space, a common experience, something cultural that differs from the usual online video proposals.
Would you say that the novelty of this 2021 edition comes more from the context and the ways of dissemination than from the content or the formal novelty of the works presented
?
On the approaches and approaches of the artists, we are always in a question of singularity.
The novelty is placed under this aspect, of a singularity of the works and the approaches which is constantly renewed.
“Filming in Dakar”, by Myriam Yates, presented at the Rencontres Internationales Paris-Berlin 2021. © RIPB 2021
Laurie Anderson, pioneer and iconic multidisciplinary artist, has carte blanche this Saturday at 6 p.m. In 2002, she was the first artist in residence at NASA. What planet is Anderson taking or sending us to in 2021
?
The planet we are going to land on is that of love and friendship.
She chose to dialogue with artist Sophie Calle and the two are very close on several levels.
We are going to be in the presence of two “planets” which will revolve around each other… and there will be Sophie Calle's film,
No Sex Last Night
, and a video piece by Laurie Anderson,
What You Mean We
.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul is famous for his unconventional narratives. On Sunday, he will present his short film
Ashes
from 2012 where he used a LomoKino, a single crank analog camcorder.
What role does the camera play in this film
?
It allows us to see, to enter into this line between melancholy, the irradiance of a feeling of love and the difficulty of resolving one's relationship to the world.
There is also a question of a political context and resistance.
The Canadian Myriam Yates questions in
Filmer à Dakar
the public spaces in perpetual reconstruction, but the only film of an African artist comes from the Moroccan Mounir Fatmi,
The Human Factor
.
What is the relationship of the Paris-Berlin International Meetings to the African presence
?
It is desired, expected and hoped for every year, but we often come up against issues of information dissemination.
Each year, a three-month open call for proposals is made, free and accessible to all.
The challenge is always to go to countries in Africa and other regions of the world where there is an exciting production, but which is rarely seen in Europe, in Paris, in Berlin.
The Human Factor
, by Mounir Fatmi, is a critical approach to the image conveyed.
He talks about the 1931 international colonial exhibition in Paris and compares these images with extracts from the film
L'Inhumaine
, by Marcel L'Hérbier, from 1923. With Marcel L'Hérbier, the intention, the relationship to the world is to the opposite of this colonial world of the interwar period.
►
The Rencontres Internationales Paris-Berlin (RIPB), from February 23 to 28, 2021, live and online from the Louvre auditorium in Paris.
Newsletter
Receive all the international news directly in your mailbox
I subscribe
Follow all the international news by downloading the RFI application
google-play-badge_FR
Cinema
Arts
France
Culture Africa