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Light Cone is proud to present a guest program at this year's edition of the UNAM International Cinema Festival (FICUNAM, Mexico City) as part of Umbrales, the section dedicated to experimental film. The screening will be introduced by Mariya Nikiforova.
The program of 16mm film prints from the Light Cone catalogue brings together three artists born in the Americas in the same generation: Teo Hernández (Ciudad Hidalgo, 1938 – Paris, 1992), Rose Lowder (Lima, 1941), and Robert Smithson (Passaic, 1938 – Amarillo, 1973). Though poignant, these biographic similarities are only superficial, and their artistic trajectories quite distinct. Smithson became one of the most important minimalist and land artists in the United States, his body of work a complex system involving theoretical writing, sculpture, film and photography. Hernández and Lowder both emigrated to France (Paris and Avignon, respectively) and became influential in the experimental film circles there. Though belonging to different cinematographic currents – Hernández incarnating a personal, ecstatic, "bodily"¹ cinema; Lowder closer to the structural tradition – they admired each other’s work. In his journal, Hernández remarked that in Lowder’s films, "(…) memory is a material that becomes one ["forms a body"] with the film"². He was doubtlessly referring to Lowder’s famous in-camera montage, in which energetically alternating shots leave persistent impressions on the retina (a phenomenon that she explored theoretically as well as practically). Jotted down a few years before shooting Pas de ciel, Hernández’s observation seems apt for his own film in more ways than one. Unrolled on a light table, the 16mm print – a blowup from the original super8 – exhibits frenetic sequences of the dancer’s Bernardo Montet’s body in choreographed poses as he teeters over a seaside cliff in Normandy: fleeting feet, legs, arms, head and torso blend into an illusion of movement. "[The] choreography took form ["took body"] little by little, or rather, liberated a body, lost its form ["body"] to become something else."³ Ironically, Lowder’s Jardin du sel – an unusual film in her filmography – is mostly meditative and still. Fascinated by salt farming, she spent time in Guérande, the historic site of salt production in France, to capture the "scintillating"⁴ golden glimmers on the surface of the salt marsh, duly noted in her notebook. The formation of salt was also one of the main concerns for Smithson in the creation of the Spiral Jetty on the North Shore of the Great Salt Lake. In the film, he intones the materials of his installation: "mud, salt crystals, rocks, water". Like the war-era bunker that serves as a dance platform in Hernández’s film and which juts out from the seashore after decades of erosion⁵, Smithson’s Jetty succumbs to the entropy of the organic processes or, in his words, "ongoing relationships"⁶ at the site. The human, the organic, and the unfathomable geological temporalities intersect in this altered environment; the epiphanic moment is incarnated by the artist’s ecstatic figure running along the spiral as seen from a helicopter window.
– Mariya Nikiforova
1. As in the term given to this informal movement by the film critic Dominique Noguez – "l’école du corps" ("the school of the body").
2. Andrea Ancira García and Neil Mauricio Andrade, Anatomía de la imagen. Notas de Teo Hernández, Buró-Buró, CDMX, 2019, p. 110.
3. Ibid., p. 243.
4. Rose Lowder, Notebook 4 (2006-2020) (unpublished), p. 192.
5. Thanks to Miguel Armas for the insight.
6. Robert Smithson, "Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape", in Nancy Holt, ed., The Writings of Robert Smithson: Essays with Illustrations, New York University Press, NYC, 1979, p. 119.
Location: Cineteca Xoco, cinema 9
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PAS DE CIEL
by Teo HERNÁNDEZ 1987 / 16mm / color / silent / 29' 00 |
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JARDIN DU SEL
SALT GARDEN by Rose LOWDER 2011 / 16mm / color / sound / 16' 11 |
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SPIRAL JETTY
by Robert SMITHSON 1970 / 16mm / color / sound / 35' 00 |
Location: Escuela Nacional de Artes Cinematográficas
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PAS DE CIEL
by Teo HERNÁNDEZ 1987 / 16mm / color / silent / 29' 00 |
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JARDIN DU SEL
SALT GARDEN by Rose LOWDER 2011 / 16mm / color / sound / 16' 11 |
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SPIRAL JETTY
by Robert SMITHSON 1970 / 16mm / color / sound / 35' 00 |
| address |
Cineteca Xoco / Escuela Nacional de Artes Cinematográficas Mexico Mexique |
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| related link |
Umbral • Cuerpo, material, sitio
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