La Jetée ("The Jetty"). (Francia / France) Chris Marker, 1962 A science fiction parable on the present, the past and the future of civilization. Constructed almost entirely from still photos, accompanied by voice-over narration, it tells the story of a post-nuclear war experiment in time travel. In a destroyed, post-apocalyptic Paris where survivors live underground, only escape through Time offers a possibility of survival. A prisoner obsessed with a scene from his childhood is sent to different time periods "to call past and future to the rescue of the present".
Aftenlandet ("Evening Land"). (Dinamarca/Denmark) Peter Watkins, 1977 A drama film depicting fictional political events in the style of a documentary, Aftenlandet shows 1970s Denmark becoming an authoritarian, quasi-fascist state in response to the threat of social dissent perceived as terrorism. At a time when the fictional elements in the film’s plot- workers’ strikes, anti-nuclear protests and terrorism- were hotly debated issues of great actuality, Watkins challenges their media representation, dominated by what he called the monoform- the internal language-form (editing, narrative structure, etc.) used by TV and the commercial cinema to present their messages and elicit highly controlled, predetermined responses from viewers. Filmed with a cast of 192 non-professional actors, Aftenlandet continues the exploration of the fictional documentary form initiated with Culloden (1964).
The Totalizing Quest of Meaning. Trinh T. Minh-ha , en/in: Michael Renov (ed.) (1993): Theorizong Documentary. London-New York: Routledge.
CONTEMPORARY ART PROJECTS
Taller de Ficció. Barcelona, The Fiction Workshop at Poble Sec (Barcelona) carries out audiovisual research on the possible connections between the local neighbourhood and the ‘work of fiction’ which according to Jacques Rancière consists in “establishing new relations between words and visible forms, speech and writing, a here and an elsewhere, a then and a now”. Wherever there is political dissensus in the local neighbourhood the Fiction Workshops seeks a way to reframe them through image and sound, introducing a kind of common- and nevertheless controversial- sense.
