Cinema and Video

Happy Lamento is the latest film by Alexander Kluge (Halberstadt, Germany, 1932), one of the great intellectuals and film-makers of our time, made in collaboration with Philippine film-maker and enfant terrible Khavn de la Cruz (Quezon City, 1972).

O que arde (Fire Will Come, 2019) takes centre stage in this edition of Intervals, a series devoted to screening recent film productions. The film, a story of containment and the wish for destruction based on the life of an arsonist, won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes 2019. Its director, Oliver Laxe, will present the first session and hold a talk after the screening.

The Museo Reina Sofía’s alignment with the celebration of LGTBIQ+ Pride is based on the archive, tracing the footsteps of experiences which have been systematically banished from collective memory.

This new edition of Intervals, a screening series centred on recent film work, presents the latest film by J.P. Sniadecki (USA, 1979), made in collaboration with Joshua Bonnetta (Canada, 1979). As a member of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, J.P. Sniadecki melds experimental film with ethnographic research, analyses of the film medium and immersive experiences.

Actress Delphine Seyrig (1932–1990) and artist and film-maker Carole Roussopoulos (1945–2009) revitalised the post-1968 feminist movement in France by way of their intensive and pioneering work in video, tearing down, with joy and caustic incision in equal measure, the passive roles attached to women in the 1960s and 1970s. This documentary, with two screenings in different sessions, reconstructs their story.

The Intervals series, which screens recent film work, welcomes one of the most arresting and poetic feature-length films in recent years, The Portuguese Woman by Rita Azevedo Gomes (Lisbon, 1952), a director who prolongs that constant tension between experimentation and narrative film-making in her work. 

This year sees the Museo Reina Sofía devote its summer cinema series to ways of appropriating, resisting and imagining the city from the neighbourhood understood as a community with class identity and a shared common history. Taking this main premise as its point of departure, the programme is organised into thematic weeks, in which every Friday and Saturday different films converse.

This eighth edition of Situated Voices, promoted by the Museo Situado network, an initiative in which different migrant collectives and neighbourhood associations from Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood collaborate with the Museo Reina Sofía, reflects on the borders which obstruct crossings and refuge for people in the contemporary world.

The Museo Reina Sofía presents the first retrospective on the film work of Josep Renau during his time in exile. This output, chiefly shown for the first time on this occasion, has been recovered by Luis E. Parés after his research into German and Mexican audiovisual archives. 

The film Estado de malestar (State of Malaise, 2019) by artist María Ruido sets forth an analysis of the malaise and illnesses stemming from capitalism in the information age. 

This new session inside Intervals, a programme which screens recent film work, presents Oscuro y lucientes (Dark and Lucientes), the fourth feature by Samuel Alarcón (Madrid, 1980). The film is one of the most fascinating and original works on Francisco de Goya.

The latest edition of Intervals, a programme which screens recent film work, presents An Opera of the World by film-maker and cultural theorist Manthia Diawara (Bamako, Mali, 1953). The film melds opera and documentary genres, reflecting on the historical relationship of migration and displacement between Africa and Europe in successive refugee crises.

The first retrospective on Sarah Maldoror (Gers, France, 1929) in Spain rediscovers a vital film-maker whose work remains obscure, despite her huge commitment to the decolonial movement and the struggles for social diversity from 1960 onwards. 

This latest instalment of the Intervals programme, which screens recent film work, welcomes the first feature-length film by artist and film-maker Filipa César (Porto, Portugal, 1975). Spell Reel (2017) constitutes a reflection on the political history of West Africa, made from precarious film archives of the colonial emancipation of Guinea-Bissau, giving rise to an open question raised on how to write the history of those who have been driven out of the present and the role bygone remnants can play in shaking up our contemporaneity.  

I diari di Angela. Noi due cineasti (Angela’s Diaries: Two Film-makers) is a posthumous homage from Yervant Gianikian (1942) to his lifelong partner and artistic companion Angela Ricci-Lucchi (1942–2018), in a final elegy and poetic act of love following her sudden death in 2018.

Created in 1982, the Prelinger Archives form the largest collection of international ephemeral cinema, with over 60,000 advertising, propaganda, educational, and amateur films, as well as home movies and American landscape films shot across the length and breadth of the 20^th century.

In Me Too. Desire and Crime the Museo Reina Sofía invites Albert Serra to curate, for the first time in his career, a series of screenings which run alongside his new film installation, Personalien, made for the Museo’s Fissures programme.

This edition of Intervals, a series which screens and presents recent films, features The Spy Within, a documentary essay on friendship and betrayal during the Years of Lead in Spain and terrorism in the Basque Country. The film narrates the relationship between Juan Gutiérrez, a mediator between the Spanish State and ETA, and his closest collaborator, Roberto Flórez, who turns out to be a spy for Spain’s Secret Services. Both sessions feature a presentation and talk by Juan Gutiérrez, the writer Edurne Portela, and the film-makers. 

Theories on the crisis of capitalism have swamped social, political and economic analyses in recent years, with all interpretations, although hugely relevant, generally lacking a proposal for the future. Paul Mason, however, has formulated a theory about the transition to an alternative and impending system — a guide to postcapitalism.

In the first comprehensive retrospective on one of today’s pivotal directors, the Museo Reina Sofía and Filmoteca Española will screen the entirety of Wang Bing’s films and film installations, scarcely exhibited or shown due to their extreme running times. Moreover, the series features the film-maker’s first lecture in Spain, along with two premieres on Spanish soil and another international premiere.

This summer’s film season explores the idea of neighbourhood cinema as an open, local space, in which images prompt a dialogue on the history, local residents, aspirations and desires inhabiting Madrid’s Lavapiés barrio.

Queerama reconstructs the history of LGBTIQ+ movements and their representation in film and popular culture from the turn of the twentieth century to the present day, doing so through the vast British Film Institute (BFI) archive. The film extends across a century of experiences of sexual diversity, encompassing public persecution and prosecution, criminalisation and medicalisation, and also sexual liberation, pride and equality struggles.

This program emerges out of the need to bring together ideas on the illnesses we suffer from, at a time when the welfare state has given way to a type of governance centered on the proliferation of new disorders, diseases, and medications.

This encounter, held in relation to the exhibition An Approach to Afal. The Autric-Tamayo Donation, recollects the central space occupied by the Afal collective in post-war Spanish photography. A conversation between two of its leading figures, photographers Ramón Masats and Carlos Pérez Siquier, and the show’s curator, Laura Terré, will be followed by the screening of Alberto Gómez Uriol’s documentary Afal, una mirada libre (Afal, a Free Gaze), which assembles declarations from the majority of its members.

This session spotlights film-maker João Moreira Salles (Rio de Janeiro, 1962) and his recent film No intenso agora (In the Intense Now, 2017), which revives the international jolt of May’ 68 through the reassembly of now-familiar film archives. Moreira Salles, regarded as one of the foremost exponents of contemporary documentary-making, will present the film via video conference.

The coda to the activities conducted by Franco Berardi Bifo in the programme Six Contradictions and the End of the Present will feature a screening of the film Comunismo futuro (Future Communism), scripted and narrated by the Italian writer and directed by Andrea Gropplero di Troppenburg. Moreover, both will present the film and subsequently discuss it with the audience.

Franco Berardi Bifo is a philosopher, writer and media theorist.

For this session of the programme Six Contradictions and the End of the Present Bifo will conduct three activities in the Museo: a public lecture, a research workshop and the presentation of the film Comunismo future (2017). In the lecture, the philosopher explores new forms of power and domination; the workshop will be set up as a work session with writings chosen specifically by the author and, as a coda to the session, Bifo will present, with Andrea Gropplero di Troppenburg, the film Comunismo futuro.

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) and the invention of the modern subject in a body of writing intersected by melancholy and the conception of multiple fictitious identities form the backbone of this series, a survey on the author of The Book of Disquiet from the perspective of film. The programme touches upon themes such as the relationship between writing and life, performance and narrative, and non-literary forms of text, featuring films by four Portuguese directors, Manoel de Oliveira, João Botelho, Paulo Rocha, and João César Monteiro, and one Brazilian, Júlio Bressane, whose work constitutes, historically speaking, a playful, popular and counter-cultural opposition to Cinema Novo.

This latest instalment of the programme Intervalos (Intervals), devoted to recent experimental and auteur cinema without distribution or release, features the first and last work by Colombian director Luis Ospina in a double bill attended by the film-maker. This Interval is a coda to the retrospective on the artist held in the Museo in 2015, dovetailing a number of the themes explored in the Intervalos programme.

In conjunction with the exhibition on the artist held in the Museo, Diego García-Moreno’s documentary Beatriz González. ¿Por qué llora si ya reí? (Why Are You Crying If I’d Already Laughed?) will be screened on 22 March, followed by a conversation with the artist, curator and teacher.

Presented within the Museo Reina Sofía’s programme centred on experimental cinema historian and theorist P. Adams Sitney (New Haven, Connecticut, 1944), this research seminar, conducted by Sitney, revolves around the structure and language of auteur cinema.

The Museo Reina Sofía will focus on the work of film theorist and historian P. Adams Sitney (New Haven, Connecticut, 1944) through Visions of Experimental Cinema, a programme featuring a lecture and seminar conducted by the author. The lecture will see Sitney address the history of avant-garde audiovisual practices in the United States, identifying a series of continuities and deviations in the conception of experimental cinema by different film-makers, for instance Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Ernie Gehr, Hollis Frampton, and Su Friedrich, whose films will be screened after the lecture. The seminar, on the other hand, will offer analysis tools to understand the visual grammar of auteur and experimental film-making. 

In this lecture, theorist and experimental cinema historian P. Adams Sitney (New Haven, Connecticut, 1944) will discuss the nature and history of experimental American film in the second half of the twentieth century.

In Portugal António Reis (1927–1991) is regarded a visionary, a master who had a major influence on the awakening of Portuguese cinema after Salazar’s dictatorship and on a new generation of film-makers in the 1980s and 1990s. Alongside his wife, psychologist Margarida Cordeiro (1939), he directed four films, shot in a new lyrical and hypnotic language. These films are presented in this film series with Manoel de Oliveira’s film Rite of Spring, on which Reis worked as assistant director and which denoted the beginnings of ethnographic and poetic film-making.

In conjunction with the film series The Eye in Matter. Dziga Vertov and Early Soviet Cinema, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía in collaboration with Filmoteca Española, the artist and film-maker Peter Kubelka will conduct a workshop on filmic creation, centred on debate and experimentation. The workshop will see Kubelka present and debate his work with the audience.

Adam Curtis reveals the way power works, its meandering architecture, the ideas that configure it, the agents and institutions involved, the way it is etched into contemporary geopolitics, into us. Power reverberates through one of the most lucid and revealing bodies of work in recent times, part of which is the focus of this film series. The films, remastered in new versions, are complemented with a masterclass, two sessions with carte blanche, ‘blank pages’, and a series of presentations.