It Is Better to Be than to Obey

The Films of Narimane Mari

From 3 to 13 May 2023 - Check programme
Narimane Mari, Bloody Beans, film, 2013
Narimane Mari, Bloody Beans, film, 2013
Curator
Chema González
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía and Documenta Madrid (20th International Film Festival

Museo Reina Sofía and Documenta Madrid bring into focus Narimane Mari (Algeria, 1969) in this film series, which includes the international premiere of her latest film S'il etait une fois (If Once Upon a Time, 2023), three live music sessions, presentations of different films and a conversation with the artist and film-maker. It constitutes the first international retrospective on Mari after her participation in prestigious film festivals like Locarno, Toronto (TIFF), New York (NYFF), Viennale, Mar del Plata and Marseille (FID), and an array of international art museums and institutions, for instance The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, Centre Pompidou and documenta 14.

Mari’s films are distinguished by how they transcend the borders of documentary, experimental cinema and fiction, exploring our perception and film’s capacity to transform reality. They move through ideologies of power, such as European colonialism, Le fort des fous (Madmen’s Fort, 2017) and Loubia hamra (Bloody Beans, 2013), and personal stories, for instance the loss of a loved one in On a eu la journée bonsoir (We Had the Day Bonsoir, 2022). By and large, her work gives form to a type of cinematography that responds to an open process stretching beyond narrative stereotypes and granting us access to new forms of knowledge.

The title to the retrospective, Mejor ser que obedecer (It Is Better to Be than to Obey), is a verse by Antonin Artaud that Mari employs as a slogan in the film Loubia hamra, and which, equally, describes the aspiration for formal freedom and the search for new states of consciousness in her work as a whole. Thus, Mari shapes a filmic practice more akin to alternative theatre as she looks to analyse film’s capacity to produce meanings. Narration is always elliptical, the protagonists are non-professional actors who work with no script and the camera moves freely beyond hierarchies and repetitions. The music and soundscapes become central in this approach: on one side, they contribute to creating states of trance and hypnosis and, on the other, they introduce emotions that connect with invisible aspects of narration.

Mari belongs to a wave of artists who endeavour to rethink film not as representation, but as an event, believing in its capacity to reconnect our experience with images. In essence, as the film-maker puts it: “[…] I’ve only had one desire, to take a rest from the kind of cinema whose rules prevent discoveries. But also to continue my work on languages by going even further to find possible narratives through other means of perception”.

Organised by

Programa

Narimane Mari, Holy Days, film, 2019
Actividad pasada Wednesday, 3 May 2023 - 8:30pm
Narimane Mari. Holy Days
France and Algeria, 2019, colour, original version without dialogue, DA, 40’

— With a presentation by Narimane Mari and screening with live music from Cosmic Neman, Quentin Rollet and Lori Schenberg

In this film the narration is at once elementary and complex: a man digs his own grave to bury himself in but in the act animals and elements try to stop him. Life and death, contained within a hypnotic, circular visual poem with mystical influences, reminds us that humanity was never at the centre of nature and that other gazes are possible. Mari explores a post-humanist cinema plagued with uncertainty and mystery, one which dies and is reborn elemental and dispossessed, reincarnated in free thinking between images, beings and situations which, rather than a philosophy of images, is a new way of sensing.

Cineteca Madrid (Matadero), Sala Azcona

224 people

Admission

General admission: €3.50. Reduced admission: €3.00 (retired people and the over 65s, the under 14s, people with disability, people out of work, large families and art associations). Free admission (holders of the JOBO culture pass). Session times may be subject to change. Please check the Cineteca Madrid website and programme

Narimane Mari, Loubia hamra [Bloody Beans], film, 2013
Actividad pasada Thursday, 4 May 2023 – 7pm / Second session: Wednesday, 10 May - 7pm
Narimane Mari. Loubia hamra [Bloody Beans]
Algeria and France, 2013, colour, original version in Arabic and French with Spanish subtitles, DA, 77’

— With a presentation by Narimane Mari and live music by Cosmic Neman, Lori Schenberg and Quentin Rollet in the first session

Narimane Mari’s first feature, awarded the Jury Prize at the Marseille International Film Festival (FID Marseille) and the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival (CPH:DOX). This original film on the Algerian War of Independence, made on its fiftieth anniversary, invokes the real from fiction: a group of children play on the beach while they express dissatisfaction over their diet based solely on red beans and the flatulence it causes. As the film progresses, with no historical setting and only through language, we find ourselves at the height of French occupation in 1960s Algeria. Unable to remain indifferent to the violence of the occupiers, the group attack the house of a vicious colonist wearing a pig mask. In disguise, they desecrate a Christian cemetery and kidnap one of the French soldiers. Once on the beach, they subject him to the torture of eating the red beans they have been forced to consume since the occupation. A playful and political fantasy with a spirit akin to Jean Vigo’s Zéro de conduite (Zero for Conduct, 1933), and with wonderful acting performances by the child protagonists.

Museo Reina Sofía, Sabatini Building, Auditorium

144 people

Admission

Free, until full capacity is reached, with prior ticket collection at the Museo’s Ticket Offices or on the Museo Reina Sofía website. A maximum of 2 per person. Doors open 30 minutes before each screening

Narimane Mari, On a eu la journée bonsoir (We Had the Day Bonsoir), film, 2022
Actividad pasada Friday, 5 May 2023 – 7pm / Second session: Thursday, 11 May - 7pm
Narimane Mari. On a eu la journée bonsoir (We Had the Day Bonsoir)
France, 2022, colour, original version in French with Spanish subtitles, DA, 63’

— With a presentation by and talk with Narimane Mari in the first session

Mari´s personal story of her relationship with Michel Hass (1934–2019), a poet, performer, abstract painter and the film-maker’s late partner. The film is a soulful portrait sketched from the images of their life together and interspersed with fragments of Hass’s work, while the editing works as a concise declaration of a beautiful and poignant loving memory. Film as experience serves as the basis for intimacy treated poetically, where illness does not overshadow the person, but instead helps us understand the experience of life and death in their length and breadth.

Museo Reina Sofía, Sabatini Building, Auditorium

144 people

Admission

Free, until full capacity is reached, with prior ticket collection at the Museo’s Ticket Offices or on the Museo Reina Sofía website. A maximum of 2 per person. Doors open 30 minutes before each screening

Narimane Mari, S´il Etait Une Fois, película, 2023
Actividad pasada Saturday, 6 May 2023 – 7pm / Second session: Friday, 12 May 2023 - 7pm
Narimane Mari. S'il etait une fois (If Once Upon a Time)
France, 2023, colour, without dialogue, original version in French and English, 20’. International premier
Narimane Mari. Holy Days
France and Algeria, 2019, colour, original version without dialogue, DA, 40

The international premiere of the film-maker’s most recent work, made in cooperation with Emma Bontron, Lucie Taffin, Tigran Avédikian, Antonin Boischot, Antoine Morin, Olivier Boischot and with the special collaboration of Gertrude Stein, Ghérasim Luca, Daniel Johnston and Alan Vega, among others. The assembly and editing in this film are all-important because it is about, as Mari puts it, “the history of the repetitions of our repetitions. A staging as a never-ending exercise is also a never-ending story of how much we love one another because we gaze at one another. With film everything can be shown that little bit closer”. The premiere will be followed by an accordion concert by Lucie Taffin and a fresh screening of Holy Days.

Museo Reina Sofía, Sabatini Building, Auditorium

144 people

Admission

Free, until full capacity is reached, with prior ticket collection at the Museo’s Ticket Offices or on the Museo Reina Sofía website. A maximum of 2 per person. Doors open 30 minutes before each screening

Narimane Mari, Le fort des fous (Madmen’s Fort), film, 2017
Actividad pasada Sunday, 7 May 2023 – 12pm / Second session: Saturday, 13 May 2023 - 7pm
Narimane Mari. Le fort des fous (Madmen’s Fort)
Germany, Algeria, France, Greece, Qatar and Switzerland, 2017, colour, original version in Arabic, Greek, English and French, with Spanish subtitles, DA, 140’

Produced by documenta 14, this contemporary epic poem on the history and tenacity of colonialism, ways of living freely in a community and the cracks inside the system of consumption forges a socio-political essay structured in three acts. The first act shows us the military exercises and teachings in the military barracks of former French President Charles de Gaulle in Algeria, whereby soldiers follow a drill to out-of-sync voiceovers and texts extracted from late nineteenth-century colonial literature. In the second act, a community wanders around the Greek island of Cythera in an alternative future and between activities of communal living, exploring how to live together. The third observes conversations between anti-system militants and activists Heval Mazlum and Annie Paparousou in the Prosfygika squat. A fragmentary experience which explores the epistemology of displacement while it practices renewed citizen identities.

Museo Reina Sofía, Sabatini Building, Auditorium

144 people

Admission

Free, until full capacity is reached, with prior ticket collection at the Museo’s Ticket Offices or on the Museo Reina Sofía website. A maximum of 2 per person. Doors open 30 minutes before each screening