Cinema and Video

Museo Reina Sofía and Documenta Madrid, an international film festival promoted by Madrid’s City Council, present a retrospective on Luke Fowler (Glasgow, 1978), a celebrated British artist, film-maker and musician. Nominated for the Turner Prize in 2012, Fowler explores the relationship between subject and archive, memory and history through the possibilities afforded by experimental cinema.

This audiovisual series pivots on cinema’s future imagining with films made between 1920 and 2020, an historical expanse of one hundred years in which the future is manifested as an idea at odds with progress conceived as dogma, as a radical critique of the present, and as a yearning for new worlds. What are the imagined futures in the past and which future is projected and desired in our present? 

Territorio Doméstico: Politicising Aprons, Pots and Streets is a documentary audiovisual piece that records the history of the make-up and struggle of the feminist collective Territorio Doméstico, a group of domestic workers who live in the Community of Madrid but come from all over the world.  

Narcisa Hirsch is one of the foremost figures in the history of Latin American and international experimental film. Born in Germany in 1928, and living in Argentina since her childhood, her name has lurked in the shadows unduly, owing to a twofold “eccentricity”: being a woman and making films that lie outside central spaces constructing the history of this filmic modality: the United States and Europe.  

Songs of the Contemporary Social War is the title of a pamphlet made by Guy Debord, signed anonymously under the pseudonym “Some iconoclasts” and dated May 1981.

Every autumn since 2016, the Museo Reina Sofía and Filmoteca Española have organised an audiovisual season which combines, over a two-month period, the film programmes of both institutions. The 2020 retrospective shines a light on Derek Jarman (1942–1994), painter, film-maker, gay rights activist, stage designer, writer and gardener.

Time is a project which, through the collective production of an experimental film, explores the intangible, and the personal and collective memories of the Museo’s team of volunteers, delving deeper into different works from the Collection.

The Museo Reina Sofía devotes a month of its audiovisual programme to the history of film on art, organising a series that pivots on a set of formal lines stretching back to the 1920s. 

By way of documentaries and essay films, this series sets forth different ways of approaching memory to explore the different zones of conflict between subjectivity and politics; between militancy and revolutions; between critical sexualities and gender transformations; between memory and democracy; between social defiance, constituent drives and tasks to reinvent the present.

Lettrism and Situationism were two intellectual and artistic movements that foreshadowed the transcendence of the idea of the avant-garde. This series, therefore, joins both movements across three blocks: Lettrism, Guy Debord and René Viénet.      

Uncertain Times III. Sustaining Lives, the third instalment comprising the summer cinema, is devoted to possible futures in this new period. Held for the first time in the Sabatini Garden and split into two themed weekly sessions, it orbits around the world we are gingerly returning to and the challenges and questions it raises.

The Museo’s usual film and video programme was brought to a standstill on 12 March of this year by the COVID-19 health emergency, along with all its other on-site activities. Thus, Uncertain Times is an audiovisual series designed to be viewed on the Museo Reina Sofía website during such an atypical situation. This second part explores the representation of the pandemic over three online sessions and a fourth celebrating the reopening of the Sabatini Auditorium.

This programme sees the Museo Reina Sofía bring together an ensemble of initiatives that will be held over the coming months (from lectures and workshops, exhibitions and digital projects, to guided tours and presentations of the Collection), encompassing the wide-ranging forms of feminist revolt present in our day-to-day.

The Museo Reina Sofía presents a retrospective on one of the vital artists and thinkers of our time: film-maker Jean-Luc Godard (1930). The series spotlights his twenty-first-century productions and his ventures into the potential of the digital image, where film is rewritten as a present-day art.

This new edition of the Intervals programme centres on two recent films which explore how to make cinema by experimenting with performance and with the role and purpose of the actor. The programme is made up of Un diálogo circunstancial (A Circumstantial Dialogue, 2019), the second film by artist Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, co-directed with film-maker and historian Luis Deltell, and Derechos del hombre (Rights of Man, 2018), a feature-length film by Juan Rodrigáñez, made in collaboration with a group of artists and performers.

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.