Cinephiles and cinephages On tastes, dissidences, conspiracy theories, zapping, cinema and technology
An itinerary through the audiovisual world thanks to the particular eyes of Benet Rossell, Lydia García-Merás, Eugeni Bonet, Amos Gitai, Arlindo Machado, Johan Grimonprez and Georges Didi-Huberman.
Eugeni Bonet and Benet Rossell: Atrapafilms (The Film Catcher): Images Flying the Birdcage
“For me, as a village boy, the cinema was vital. I remember the film sessions in Àger and Tremp. In Àger they were held at the Café Pepito, which doubled up as a soda-siphon filling factory and meeting point for all the smugglers in the valley, and where they also put on plays and concerts. In Tremp there was a real cinema; La Lira. The person who recommended which films be shown was the town cobbler, and his shoe shop was a kind of film club avant la lettre.”
Lydia García-Merás: El cine de la disidencia. La producción militante antifranquista (1967-1981)
The fourth published installment from the Desacuerdos project documents and analyzes the aesthetic and political debate that surged from both militant cinema and video creations from the end of the Franco era until today. Publication available in Spanish.
Eugeni Bonet: La pantalla bien servida: la nutrición audiovisual
Eugeni Bonet (Barcelona, 1954) is one of the main theoretical referents in the fields of cinema, video and digital media in Spain. For forty years his writings have shown the evolution of these disciplines, establishing genealogies, working methods and the links between four different generations of artists. This book, published specifically for this project, compiles Bonet’s most important writings, many of which appeared in rare magazines and fanzines, out-of-print catalogues and even unpublished texts. Publication available in Spanish.
Amos Gitai: Génesis
This work traces the genesis and evolution of the films by director Amos Gitai's, period by period, as well as the particularities of his unique creative process.
Johan Grimonprez: Remote Control: on Zapping, Close Encounters and the Commercial Break
“Re-runs of The Twilight Zone sci-fi classics were competing for airtime with the monster-hit The X-Files, which rapidly began an appetite for conspiracy theory within the mainstream. Conspiracy culture blossomed across the political spectrum, disrupting the official narratives of truth, authority, and reality. UFO communities were now convinced that the powers-thatbe were covering up all evidence of aliens.”
Arlindo Machado: El sujeto y el dispositivo: del cine al ciberespacio
Cinema, criticism, museum, white cube, performance, pop, audience and subjectivity are some of the concepts crucial to contemporary art. Inspired by Raymond Williams' Keywords (1976), this is an attempt to update a specific lexicon, just as Williams attempted to eliminate the traditional boundary between the artistic and the social. This book compiles the lectures given in the context of a course at MACBA in the fall of 2007 and 2008. Publication available in Spanish.
Georges Didi-Huberman: Pobles exposats, pobles figurants
As part of the “Writing art history. Dialogues in the present continuous” conference held for the Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory 2010, Didi-Huberman gave a lecture entitled “Peuples exposés, peuples figurants”, which has been translated for the first time into Catalan in this Quadern portàtil.