Doomscrolling: Shorts Against Despair
This Isn’t the Future I Ordered: Doomscrolling: Shorts Against Despair
In a programme structured like the unchecked, hyper-specific landscape of a doomscrolling session, these works offer pit stops to indulge in panic, curiosity, anger, longing and hope - all in search of some way everything will feel okay again.
A famous cat longs for a distant lover to soft piano music while an apocalyptic droney symphony by Godspeed You! Black Emperor rages over images of a capitalist hellscape. Jean-Luc Godard rages against a genocidal siege while a nearby television station screens his films as a comfort. Strange, humanoid avatars emerge from images of Filipino film sets and a cosmic entity broadcasts its lessons about humanity into the ether hoping they might stick. Harun Farocki worries about computer generated images of nature while a famous painter tries to find colour to paint fields with again.
This intense, relentless programme tears through video art works that question our safety and comfort in this world, fantasy non-fiction made to unsettle and earnest personal essays that try to ground us in a dizzying time. Each of these films uses the language of cinema to respond to some kind of disenchantment and uncertainty - not only with the world, but with the tools we have to capture it.
From the Philippines to wartime Croatia, from 2022 to 1968, each of the makers in this programme looked at some aspect of their reality and thought - this isn’t what I asked for. In the dark of the cinema, each of them - and each of us - can shake out our fears and dissatisfactions and see if someone else felt the same, once - and if they managed to do something about it.
The programme will be introduced by programmer Farah Hasanbegović.
Programme
General Alert (Godard) (Sanja Iveković, HR 1995-2000, 3’)
General Alert (Godard) offers direct access to a time when the national broadcaster, HRT, frequently had to overlay its programming with real-time air raid warnings. A sinister jolt back into reality for a nation trying to escape its besieged reality.
Parallel I (Harun Farocki, DE 2011, 16’)
The first instalment of Parallel, originally a multi-channel installation, examines the history of computer graphics as it is being written - particularly the way that the natural world is replicated on screen. Have these new ways of making images come to liberate us from something?
We Are Winning Don't Forget (Jean-Gabriel Périot, FR 2004, 7’)
A family photo album of the free world showing how class struggle emerges again.
De Poes (The Cat) (Johan Van der Keuken, NL 1968, 6’)
Van Der Keuken’s rarely screened De Poes offers a delightfully stern and hilarious takedown of how comfortable cinema got in its formulas, but a greater cosmic truth also lurks at the centre of each image, in the glue of each cut.
We Still Have To Close Our Eyes (John Torres, PH 2019, 13’)
John Torres repurposes documentary footage captured from the sets of various Filipino productions (including the likes of Lav Diaz and Erik Matti) into an eerie, elliptical sci-fi narrative about human avatars controlled by apps.
Je vous salue, Sarajevo (Jean-Luc Godard, FR 1993 2’)
Just miles away from the broadcast of the Godard film featured in Iveković’s General Alert (Godard), the city of Sarajevo finds itself under the longest siege in modern history. A heartfelt and furious lament on the history of mankind, war, and the art of living.
The Sadness Will Not Last Forever (Alexei Dmitriev, NL/RU 2016, 8’)
The most beautiful paintings are those which you dream about when you lie in bed smoking a pipe, but which you never paint. A film that feels like the sun on your face on a slow morning.
Cat Listening to Music (Chris Marker, FR 1994, 3’)
Cat Listening to Music sees the director’s beloved cat, Guillaume-en-Égypte, captured in a melancholic moment. Beautiful cinnamon roll - too good for this world, too pure.
In the Name of Small Things (Jen Tarnate, PH 2022, 18’)
A cross between space transmission and prayer, an unknown being reached out into the void, asking what it means to be here, and to be vulnerably human and alien to our own existence all at once.
The films in this programme are either spoken or subtitled in English.
This is part of
Details
Production year
2024
Length
85 min.
Event language
English
Country
NL
Part of
Programmers of the Future 2024
Three new Programmers of the Future will present their film programmes in Eye Filmmuseum this July. With films against despair, a colourful trip through the human psyche through animated films, and cinema that sharpens your senses.
Eye Film Player
Programmer of the Future Farah Hasanbegović selected films to watch at home, including Dream of Silk, in which director Nahid Rezai zooms in on the lives of young girls in 2003 Tehran.
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