Little Histories of Cinema (II)

Children's film series

"Imagine an eye free of the laws of perspective created by Man, an eye not influenced by composed logic, an eye that does not respond to the names of things, but that understands each new object it discovers in life through a perceptional adventure. How many colors are there in a field to a crawling child who is ignorant of Green? How many rainbows can light create for the untrained eye?"

Stan Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision

Here we present the second edition of Little Histories of Cinema, a program geared towards the youngest audiences in which each episode is built around a central concept and explores material from different eras, genres and authors, emphasizing animated films and those which have used the media's illusionary aspects as an instrument of exploration. These histories are little in two ways; first, they offer a hypothesis about alternative histories of the 20th century that have only marginally existed. Secondly, they are directed to a "little" audience with the intention of explaining that film has been the most important artistic media in the 20th century.

This edition consists of two sessions focusing on the most important contributions, neither narrative nor of the conventional filmic structure, made by the rather unusual genre classified as "abstract" or "experimental."

The first session will present experimental films from the sixties and seventies in which viewers can appreciate the explorations, ideas, and expressions of reality (both universal and personal) only possible through filmic media thanks to the possibilities of manipulation of form in time and space. The pieces are lyric, philosophic, humoristic... and they are all rather hypnotic. The second session will cover the origins of abstract cinema pre-dating WWII. It will explore the hand that visual artists connected to avant-garde artistic movements such as Cubism or Dada played, focusing on abstraction and the possibilities that concrete forms have when projected on screen. These works show the importance of rhythm in films that can be understood almost as a musical score.