Cinema and video

Various authors, whether from the perspective of science fiction literature, like Octavia E. Butler, or contemporary feminist theory, like Donna J. Haraway, advocate the need to overcome certain concepts that condition our contemporary understanding of the world, such as the Anthropocene, and to propose other alternatives, like the Chthulucene, in order to rethink a relationship between species that leaves behind the primacy of the human being as the centre and measure of all things and explores the potential of this relationship to generate new ways of life and possible new more sustainable and solidarity worlds for all species that inhabit it, that allow us to survive the current situation of climatic emergency. From Haraway’s notion of “companion species”, this film season wishes to examine how cinema—understood as a popular manifestation of contemporary anxieties—explores the relationship between species and the human being’s relationship with their environs from various optics; some more catastrophic and others more hopeful, in consonance with Haraway’s vision.

The cult film Phase IV, a canonical example of the apocalyptic sci-fi movie, introduces us to a dystopia in which ants develop a group mind and consciousness of their power and take over control of the Erath, forcing human beings to adapt to the new civilization in which both species have to live together. On the other hand, Soylent Green, another classic sci-fi movie, and a visionary example of the destructive effects of climate emergency, takes a look at the capacity of the human being to destroy the environment in which the Earth must survive.

From a less catastrophic, although no less unsettling perspective, Little Joe reflects on the capacity of science to force this collaboration between species through genetic manipulation and how its form of perverting the course of nature means that it does not always serve human purposes in the way it was intended. The purported supremacy of the human species is brought into question when the modified plants overturn the relationship of power and find ways of surviving that make use of the needs of the people who created them.

Meanwhile, The Shape of Water, Border and Gunda offer gazes that anticipate a less-human oriented future with more interspecies collaborations. Gunda borrows the narrative and formal structures of the documentary to follow the daily life of a pig, two cows, and a one-legged chicken, reminding us that we share the world with millions of different species that deserve to be taken into account and appreciated by us within their own environs, with their own everyday routines and with the same compassion with which we observe ourselves. Border takes a look at how we construct a non-human identity in contemporary Finland and how to develop networks and structures for coexistence between two species—humans and trolls—despite their shared disturbing past. Finally, Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water is a melodrama telling the love story between a woman and an amphibian man, opening the door to a relationship between species like those told by Octavia E. Butler in her sci-fi stories. In conclusion, this film season wishes to offer and explore ways in which film imagines us, how it thinks of other species and our relationship with them and thus anticipate the various worlds in which we will have to live.

Curated by Jara Fernández Meneses and Estrella Serrano Tovar.

Jara Fernández Meneses has curated film seasons for institutions like MNCARS and Cruce, and formed part of the programming team for Cineteca for four years and is a former member of the selection committees for the Documenta and Animario international festivals. She has written film reviews for Cahiers du Cinema. España/Caimán. Cuadernos de cine, cultural reviews for Serie B and has taught film classes in Kent and Exeter universities in the UK and at the Carlos III university in Madrid. In her free time, she likes to deejay vinyl records of black music and to play dominoes.

Estrella Serrano Tovar has worked in institutions like MNCARS, AECID and the Cervantes Institute. Naturally curious, she enjoys learning new ways of interacting with culture and art, understanding relationships with neighbouring communities as a key part of her work and trying to connect with people with shared interests to undertake new projects. She is the head of the Education and Activities department at Museo CA2M since 2020.

LABORAL CENTRO DE ARTE Y CREACIÓN INDUSTRIAL AND CA2M CENTRO DE ARTE DOS DE MAYO COPRODUCTION

The exhibition AUTO. road and movies complete the programming of Sueño y materia -dream and material- proposing an approximation to some of the aspects of the film and automobile. The films that compose the cycle, rather than trying to make an overview from the film gender, compose an individual propose of analysis that finds in its complement and global context within the exhibition. If the show reflects on the automobile culture from an art perspective from the latest years, and does it from the consideration of the car as the greatest exponent of a productive and technologic period that already perceive other social and industrial realities. This cycle allows casting a retrospective glace that illustrates complementary aspects of the show..

The cycle is composed by several European and Northamerican productions which a faithful reflexion of the way both continents represent the automobil. In the States, the great and fast adaptability of the film productions easily integrate  automobile as well as unfold  the fast development of a subgender as it is the road movie. The road, search for freedom, escape, speed and persecutions become common elements and codes in many films. On the contrary, the European cinematographic glace is considerable more critic and scentic about automobile and culture. It is not common within the United States culture a movie that critically reflects on the problems derivated from the automobile. On the contrary, in Europe, automobile is the sintome and the sign of unadecuated evolution of our society: alienation, violence, urban problems and deshumanification. The critic to the automobile culture takes here the demonstration of a disagreement that embraces the whole society. Alongside the proper cinematographic productions, CA2M presents other road movies with a more experimental or enssayist character, showing as well other aspects as the extension and adaptability of the proper road movie concept as a construction mechanism. Works as Sophie Calle or Chip Lord acquire greater relevance in aspects such as autobiography, identitarian or culture.

Alberto Martín
Curator of the exhibition Auto. Dream and materia

FR 23 OCT 20:30 H.
Weekend. Jean-Luc Godard. 1967, V.O.S., French 105 min.
A supposedly idyllic weekend trip to the countryside turns into a never-ending nightmare of traffic jams, revolution, cannibalism and murder as French bourgeois society starts to collapse under the weight of its own consumer reoccupations. A car trip by road will be full of unexpected contingences, gestions, accidents and eccentric characters.
 

Fri  30 OCT 20:30 H.
Night on Earth. Jim Jarmusch. 1991, V.O.S., English. 129 min.
A collection of five vignettes taking place during the same night, concerning the temporary bond formed between taxi driver and passenger in five cities: Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome, and Helsinki. Cada historia trata sobre la relación que entabla un taxista local y sus pasajeros. Journeys where occur diverse events ranging from comic to dramatic..

FR 6 NOV 20:30 H.
Trafic. Jacques Tati. 1971, V.O.S. French. 96 min.
Mr. Hulot is a bumbling automobile designer who works for Altra, a Paris auto plant. He, along with a truck driver and a publicity agent (Maria Kimberly), take a new camper-car (designed by Hulot) to an auto Fair in Amsterdam. On the way there, they encounter various obstacles on the road. Some of the obstacles that Hulot and his companions encounter are getting impounded by Dutch customs guards, a car accident (meticulously choreographed by the filmmakers), and an inefficient mechanic. In the film, “Tati leaves no element of the auto scene unexplored, whether it is the after-battle recovery moments of a traffic-circle chain-reaction accident, whether it a study of drivers in repose or garage-attendants in slow-motion, the gas-station give-away (where the busts of historical figures seem to find their appropriate owners) or the police station bureaucracy.”

FRI 13 NOV 20:30 H.
Paris, Texas. Wim Wenders. 1984, V.O.S. English 147 min.
An amnesiac man who, after mysteriously wandering out of the Mojave Desert, attempts to re-assimilate his life with his brother, his seven year old son, as well as track down his former wife.

FRI 27 NOV 20:30 H.
No Sex last night (Double-Blind). Sophie Calle. 1992, V.O.S. English 75 min.
In this road movie, Sophie Calle and Gregory Shepard account their road trip across the States.   Both hide behind their cameras as they make the mythical journey westward from New York to California in Greg's troubling convertible. The couple stops in a Las Vegas Drive-Thru wedding chapel and decide to get married, in order to save their shaky relationship, with their cameras recording everything. A road movie fraught with places that the protagonists take distance from. The third character, the car, actively participates during the complete shooting of the film, touting the trip despite being the habitual habitat of Sophie and Greg. Homemade shots with apparently thoughtless shots, reflections on the human condition and on the couple with a exquisite editing which makes such an estrange and active film.

FRI 4 DIC 20:30 H.
Motorist. Chip Lord. 1989, V.O.S. English. 70 min.
El automóvil como icono norteamericano es un tema que siempre ha fascinado a Chip Lord. A "road video" homage to the car culture of the 1950s and '60s. MOTORIST follows the driver of a 1962 Thunderbird as he crosses the Southwest and arrives into Los Angeles, all the while commenting on the road and his personal history with cars. Richard Marcus plays the motorist with a nervous intensity that captures the "white line fever" of a cross-country road trip.

 FRI 11 DIC 20:30 H.
The Devil on Wheels Duel. Steven Spielberg. 1971, V.O.S. English 90 min.
The devil on wheels is one of the greatest representative films where the vehicule become a threat. Indeed, the threat reaches a methaphoric character, an atmosphore of nighmares that refers and affects nature and the surviving instinte of the protagonist, a commercial agent that drives his car and is besieged my a truck. The car is shotted emphasizing its agressive and almost monstrious character, where the truck driver is no the one frightening, but the truck itself.  This humanization of the truck provoques that we get to see it endowed by instinct and will.

FRI 18 DIC 20:30 H.
Little Miss Sunshine. Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, 2006, V.O.S., English 101 min.
The Hoover is quite a conflict family: Sheryl Hoover is an overworked mother of two children who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her brother Frank is a gay scholar of French author Marcel Proust, temporarily living at home with the family after a suicide attempt. Her husband Richard is striving to build a career as a motivational speaker and life coach. Dwayne, Sheryl's son from a previous marriage, is an unhappy teenager who has taken a vow of silence until he can accomplish his dream of getting into the US Air Force Academy in order to become a test pilot. Richard's foul-mouthed father, Edwin, a World War II veteran recently evicted from a retirement home for using and selling heroin, lives with the family. He is close with his seven-year-old granddaughter, Olive.

Free entry

FR 20 FEB "Om Shanti Om" Farah Khan
SAT 21 FEB "Parineeta" Pradeep Sarkar

CA2M brings a view to the popular India by screening two films. Two productions in the purest Bollywood style reflecting the Indian film industry with its plots.

This activity is parallel to the opening of ARCO, being India the guest country and the exhibition Cultura popular India and Mas Allá. The (emerging) schism never stated at sala Alcalá 31 of the Regional Government of Madrid, CA2M offers a vision of the popular India from films.

PROGRAMME

FEB FR 20. Om Shanti Om, de Farah Khan

India - 2007 - 35 mm, 168 min. Director: Farah Khan
Script: Farah Khan.
Music: Vishal Dadlani, Shekhar Ravjiani, Pyarelal Ramprasad, Sharma.
Production: Red Chillies Entertainment.
Actors: Shahrukh Khan, Deepika Padukone, Arjun Rampal, Shreyas
Talpade, Satish Shah, Kirron Kher.

The purest magic and color from Bollywood brought to us by Farah Khan. The film maker, deeply known by her talent as choreograph, presents her second movie, protagonized by the Bollywood star, Shah Rukh Khan, and new signing, Deepika Padukone, Om Shanti Om is a hommage to the golden age from the Bollywood, with a plot starting in the 70.

Om Prakash, , a two-bit actor, meets a Bollywood film star with whom he is in love. Unfortunaly,  they are not  destiny to live their love in that life, Om dies in a fray. The story comes back to present, where Om Prakash reincarnates in Om Kappor, the superstar from Bollywood 2007. This film looks back at the popular Indian films with a relentless flow of visual resourses, where the greatest stars from Bollywood have cameos with the birthday of the protagonist.

Auditorium
Free entry

FEB 21 SAT. Parineeta, de Pradeep Sarkar.
Director Pradeep Sarkar. India, color, 35mm. 130 min.
Script: Vidhu Vinod Chopra.
Production: Vidhu Vinod Chopra.
Music: Shantanu Moitra. Letra: Swanand Kirkire.
Actors: Raima Sen, Saif Ali Khan, Sanjay Dutt, Vidya Bala.

This film is based on a literary classic, at least with contact points. The film maker knows that he has in hand a subject with legions of viewers. At the same time, he has the challenge of distilling emotions written on the screen with virtuosity. Pradeep Sarkar is successful. And how! He has taken the liberty of passing the scene of his debut film Parineeta, by the writer Saratchandra Chatterjee (author of Devdas) of Calcutta from 1913 to the vibrant and sultry Calcutta from 1962. But beyond the challenge of deploying the classic pages with vivid images on the screen, without subtracting one iota of emotional subtlety to the story and its characters. Shekhar (Saif Ali Khan's idol), son of a wealthy businessman, and Lolita (Vidya Balan radiant), an orphan who lives with the family of his uncle, are neighbors and childhood friends who do not recognize the intense love that binds them together, until a  London manager arrives and creates a love triangle. A refreshing return to the romanticism of the past, Parineeta is a wild and irresistible ride in the purest Bollywood style.

Auditorium
Free entry

Film, video, music and other delights… During the weekend, it will take place at CA2M in a relaxing atmosphere, different contemporary representations of moving images and sounds: four video screenings, three concerts and a  film screening accompanied by  venues for encounters.

PROGRAMMING

FR 20
20:00: Wine party to start awaking our senses at CA2M hall.
20:30 h: OFFMÓSTOLES09 presentation.

PROGRAM 1. CA2M Auditorium

21:30 h: y para cerrar el primer día OFF, el estreno de La Zona, concierto de Tadeo

SAB 21
13:00 h: un buen momento para tomarse un aperitivo en nuestra terraza y comenzar el día.
13:30 h: concierto: Pierre Bastien. Terraza del CA2M
14:30 h: picoteo y charla al sol de noviembre en la terraza
16:00 h: PROGRAMA 2. Salón de Actos

Durante toda la tarde, tés, cafés y pastas en torno a los que poder hablar… para que no se enfríe el ambiente

17:30 h: PROGRAMA 3. Salón de Actos
19:00 h: Les plages d’Agnès, Agnès Varda. Salón de Actos

DOM 22
13:00 h: despiértate el domingo al sol de nuestra terraza.
13:30 h: concierto de Kammerflimmer Kollektief. Terraza del CA2M.
14:30 h: picoteo y charla al sol de noviembre
16:00 h: PROGRAMA 4. Salón de Actos

INFORMACIÓN COMPLEMENTARIA

Los cuatro programas de cortos presentan un variado conjunto de la creación reciente en vídeo. Los programas 1 y 3 han sido comisariados por el CA2M y recogen algunas creaciones exhibidas durante los últimos años en festivales y exposiciones internacionales. A pesar de que estos programas no responden a un planteamiento temático, las piezas que se presentan comparten muchos puntos de conexión, tanto en los asuntos tratados como en los aspectos formales, quizás por que sean reflejo de las pre ocupaciones que ocupan a la mayoría de artistas representados, todos ellos nacidos después de la década de los 70.

El fin de semana contará también con un programa comisariado por el colectivo madrileño Playtime audiovisuales (programa 2) que recoge algu nas de las últimas producciones nacionales que se encuentran en la periferia del cine comercial; producciones de autor con marcado carácter independiente que están a camino entre el documental, la ficción y la videocreación. Este programa recoge una sele cción de artistas españoles emergentes que con sus obras intentan romper fronteras entre formatos, soportes y también espacios de exhibición. Y cerraremos el fin de semana con un programa temático de corte más experimental comisariado por Xavier García B aldón: El paisaje del hombre en el que se suceden paisajes reales y soñados, utópicos y apocalípticos, desiertos o habitados, primitivos, mediáticos, naturales o humanos. El arte del paisaje en nueve filmes y vídeos recientes, entre postales mandados des de la prehistoria, cuadros de otros mundos, escenas humanas y visiones de videojuegos.

Asimismo se presentará por primera vez en Madrid la última película de la gran dama del cine de autor francés Agnès Varda "Les Plages d'Agnès".

La parte musical del fin de semana la completan tres conciertos que nos acercan a la magia del directo desde posiciones muy diversas: la electrónica como acompañamiento sonoro del cine, la mecánica aplicada a la creación musical y una aproximación al jazz desde una óptica nada ortodoxa… de la mano de Tadeo, Pierre Bastien y Kammerflimmer Kollektief respectivamente. Todo ello acompañado de picoteo, bebida y espacios para la charla y el encuentro.

ARTISTAS: Peggy Ahwesh, Pierre Bastien, Alex Brendemühl, Carlos Casas, Luis Cerveró, Chris Chong Chan Fui, Anouk de Clercq, Aitor Equeverría, Félix Fernández, Fernando Franco, Beatrice Gibson, Stephen Gray, John Hey, Kammerflimmerkollektief, Pablo Lamar, Adam Leech, Vicent Meessen, Michael Morley, Jacco Olivier, Pedro Ortuño, Manuel Padding, Enrique Piñuel, Elodie Pong, Michael Robinson, Rogelio Sastre, Tadeo, Mike Tamney, Agnés Varda, César Velasco Broca.

Free entry

With the title The Films of…, we will get together to view the work of artists who use audiovisuals to speak about the here and now. There is no common theme as such between the different sessions, rather what unites them is a shared urgency to understand our surrounding world and its everyday effects on us inasmuch as inhabitants of techno-capitalism. In this proposal, there is also an intention to break away from the idea of a retrospective as the ultimate recognition of an artist’s long-standing career. The age of the artists is not important, nor the years that they have been working, nor the number of films they have made. What really interests us is that they share their working processes with us, their first and last films, their doubts and working methods.

3 FEBRUARY 17:30

The films of Jorge Suárez-Quiñones and Guillermo Pozo
With Jorge Suárez-Quiñones and Guillermo Pozo in attendance

Yohei. 63’. 2015.
Amijima. 54’ 55’’. 2016.
Gimcheoul. 97’. 2018.

Since 2014, the year they started their artistic and sentimental relationship, Jorge and Guillermo have been searching for themselves in images and in sounds. Their films are crossed journeys, their own and other people’s diaries full of repeated paragraphs and blank sheets. Guillermo’s body, always in front of the camera, is more of a container than a character, sometimes it is just a gesture, other times it is possessed by Jorge and then we have no idea who or what is speaking to us. Both of them, and also what they create, like to caress plants, wet their hands and invoke ghosts. The three feature-length films they have made to date (and this is the first time that all three can be seen together in one session), invite us to feel the form, to break the causality proper to narrative film and to find them/ourselves in the physicity of light and in phonemes.

10 FEBRUARY 18:30

The films of Mar Reykjavik
With Mar Reykjavik in attendance

My body the rules. 13’. 2017.
El Verí. 35’. 2018.
WAAITT. 15’. 2018.

The image as possibility, the pixel made flesh, stone and tree trunk. Poison. The films of Mar Reykjavik speak to us of what is not seen, of the in-between, and the power to generate new meanings by annihilating the image. She says that “poison does not kill but contemplates death in things in order to give them new meanings”. Accordingly, bodies become metallic supports and stands, and the stones emotional anchors. In her work there is a certain obsession with embodying the digital, like a desire to condense times, places and materials in search of the total image. A representation that is imitable for everybody; people, objects, animals and everything that breathes between one and the other. Sometimes her films are screened, but nearly always they move and perform themselves. This time three of them will coexist in the same space and it will be our bodies that move to view them on a path at times guided, at times suspended.

17 FEBRUARY 18:30

The films of Laura Huertas-Millán
With Laura Huertas-Millán in attendance

Laberinto. 21’. 2018.
Jenny 303. 6’. 2018.
Aequador. 19’. 2012.
Journey to a land otherwise known.23’. 2011.

Film, in uppercase, has often addressed landscape throughout the course of History, subjecting it to a romantic view and the ideology of the person recording it. Very often, almost always, the subject behind the camera is a cis, white, heterosexual and middle class man. In other words, the representation of our surroundings and of the other-place, of those spatially and culturally distant landscapes, belongs to power. It is in this framework that Laura Huertas-Millán’s films offer us some salvation. They discover for us a whole multitude of fissures in this hegemonic representational system. These cracks are material and conceptual, even temporal. Ruins and virtual architecture are some of the tools that Huertas-Millán uses to perforate History, breaking it and opening room for other systematically erased stories.

24 FEBRUARY 18:30

The films of Mario Pfeifer
With Mario Pfeifer in attendance

Untitled [“Two Guys”]. 8’. 2008.
Again. 41’ 39’’. 2018.

There is ten years between Mario Pfeifer’s first and last films. Both of them speak to us of power and representation in contemporary Europe, although the social and political turbulences that have taken place during the last decade are enough to make Pfeifer’s language necessarily more explicit, for his images to give names and surnames to the xenophobia and violence systematically exercised by the West on its frontiers, in the mass media and in refugee camps. From the political implication of their gestures, agency and reproduction, to the re-enactment and mise en scène based on real events, Pfeifer’s works analyse migratory movements and the refugee crisis in Germany with aesthetic and narrative precision, uncovering the media technologies and the necropolitics of the victors.

Manuel Polo and Jesús Macías are the stars of Todo lo contrario. These ninety-somethings are what you could call film buffs, although unknowingly, because they would never think in those terms, but they use scenes from films to show us what they are thinking or they flesh out ordinary memories with movie memories. They lived during that time and in that world when cinema, the only art form that has been genuinely popular, had an all-pervasive presence; you worked, ate, slept, went to the cinema, just one more thing in the everyday flow of life. This programme came about from a meeting between them and a voluntary film buff, someone who started out at the end of that time and of that world.

Following many conversations and films that the involuntary and voluntary film buffs mentioned and noted, respectively, it was whittled down to six. Manolo’s and Jesús’s tastes are filtered through another taste. Six examples of the talent accumulated in Hollywood during the golden age of the big studios. Six seminal movies, six true works of art and sources of aesthetic (and ethical) pleasure. Six ethical and (aesthetic) hypotheses whose characters mutate, with the torment and pain and excitement of change; they find out who they are and discover their inner desires through chance meetings, reunions, disagreements. And Manolo and Jesús, who saw them, perhaps get to discover something about themselves and about others through them, recognising themselves in them. And perhaps we will too.

The titles already give us a clue to the (dramatic) weight that falls on women, dealing with their adventures and their freedom. After Captains Courageous we could ask ourselves “How can you grow up without losing your childhood?” and answer, thanks to It Happened One Night and The Awful Truth, “by letting fantasies of love lead to companionship, seriousness to improvisation, humour and fun”. But you can still hear a voice saying: “Yes, ok, but… What happens if we are women light years away from the standard, or if certain relationships place us in danger?” That’s where the queen, the pirate and the voyager have something to say.

Passing on this experience, at once intimate and shared, digging up those dead who are still very much alive in the minds of non-experts, helps to understand the overwhelming influence and presence of cinema, when it offered an opportunity for sentient learning every day, a gift for the eyes everyday for everyone. Every week, Jesús, a hairdresser since he was practically a boy, would go through the programme and choose the movies he was going to see, without bothering to take into account how near or how far away the cinema was from his home-hairdresser’s: “Whether it was in Tetuán or Vallecas, it didn’t matter, I went anyway. All cinemas were for me”.

The conjunction was inevitable. While Filmoteca Española (FE), jointly with the publishers Cátedra, were publishing the book La codorniz (de la revista a la pantalla y viceversa), by Aguilar and Cabrerizo, Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo (CA2M) was preparing the exhibition “Absurd Humour” and the book of the same name by the curator Mery Cuesta. To a certain extent, they were forced to get on and, as was the case in hand, “to associate together” in order to jointly imagine a shared variety show. And so, driven by the unbridled imagination of the current confinement, this double programme came about with an evident desire to strike up another equally necessary coupling: a bridge between two generations of comedians with several decades between them. Does the blood of Codorniz humour run through the veins of Chanante humour and its contemporary derivates?

FE and CA2M organized a series of events and rereadings of filmic creations that arose around the satirical magazine La Codorniz run by some of the most outstanding voices in absurd humour today. The playful, surrealist quality of the folly unquestionably runs through the veins of these proposals which, in the second programme, focus on a direct intervention in creations from the past through the optic of the present moment. While Joaquín Reyes dubs fragments of Noticiario de Cine-Club newsreels featuring intellectuals and forward-thinkers from Madrid and Barcelona in 1930, the Tono & Mihura’s “humoristic production” called Un bigote para dos [A Moustache For Two]–“a stupid film for serious people”—is given a revamp by the hands (and voices) of the humoristic practices of Juan Cavestany, Julián Genisson and Lorena Iglesias (members of the Canódromo Abandonado collective) and Venga Monjas.

CAs if they were Jardiel Poncela’s parodic overdubbings of silent movies called “celuloides rancios” now updated to the digital era, the double programme “A Moustache for the 21st Century” goes to clearly show the generational transmission of a kind of nonsense logic humour that ran through Spanish films for many decades, and which is still alive today (at least we believe so) in more contemporary humoristic practices. The connections between Tono & Mihura and Venga Monjas, or between Neville and Joaquín Reyes, emerge naturally, revealing the staying power of absurd humour as a sign of identity of Spanish culture. At the same time, Chanante humour is paired directly with its spiritual forebears, raising absurd laughter. And so to paraphrase the fairground huckster in Verbena: “Step right in [ladies and gentlemen]! Have we a just and moral show for you!”.

SESSIONS

CODORNICESCAS PRESENTATIONS | From 22 May

A whole series of audiovisual productions sprung up around La Codorniz, the most iconic satirical magazine in the history of Spanish popular culture. Today these productions are revisited (and recommended) by the researchers Aguilar and Cabrerizo and the filmmaker Carlo Padial (Algo muy gordo, 2017).

_ Verbena (1941), by Edgar Neville [31 min]. Presentation by Santiago Aguilar and Felipe Cabrerizo.
_ Don Viudo de Rodríguez (1935), by Jerónimo Mihura [14 min], + El corazón de un bandido (1968), by Chumy Chúmez [7 min]. Presentations by Carlo Padial.

SCREWBALL OVERDUBBINGS | From 5 June

The practice of screwball overdubbing, the audiovisual sound and image collage, is an excellent way of creating an absurd humoristic effect. Thanks to Tono & Mihura’s Un bigote para dos, their 1940 screwball film, a comedy rewriting of the dialogue of a Johann Strauss biopic, and to Jardiel Poncela and his “celuloides rancios”, these redubbings were hugely popular back in the 1940s. Today we have chosen the filmmaker Juan Cavestany (Gente en sitios, 2013) and two comedian duos, Julián Genisson & Lorena Iglesias and Venga Monjas, to revisit this vintage comic practice from Spanish culture and to make a new dubbing for Un bigote para dos. The programme is rounded off with a dubbing by Joaquín Reyes, in the style of his “Retrospecter” or “Mundo viejuno” sketches, of a newsreel directed by Giménez Caballero.

_ Noticiario de Cine-Club (1930), by Ernesto Giménez Caballero [31 min]. Fragment dubbed by Joaquín Reyes.
_ Un bigote para dos (1940), by Tono y Mihura [64 min]. Dubbed by (in order of appearance) Juan Cavestany (subtitling) / Julián Genisson & Lorena Iglesias / Venga Monjas.