In 2014 four artists from the art studios of the Kunstetage Köln offered a series of thematic screenings taking place every Thursday evening. Within this screenings I produced some didactic found-footage films around singular narrative elements in cinema. Here some examples:
The Kiss
2014 // Video-collage // 22’04”
“a naked face is already nudity and each word is already obscenity” (Simone de Beauvoir ‘Les Manderins’)
A kiss is one of the strongest symbols of history, used by artists in the roman times and the middle ages as a display of aristocratic love, in the renaissance as an image of civilisation and compassion, and finally since the romanticism as the overall symbol of love. Cinema has expanded the mystic of the kiss with its narrative genres and illusionary reality to unforeseeable levels, placing the kiss as the ultimate experience towards happiness. Although, there was another subversive forms that banalized the kiss to its flesh and skin nature: pornography. Based on the infamous Sacher-Masoch’s ‘Venus in Furs,’ ’The Kiss’ is a melodramatic film collage made out of sexploitation, hard and soft-porn classical film-footage
totem et tabou
2013 // Film-collage // 22’57”
Jean-Luc Godard’s interest in graphic design and typography is clear, with almost the entirety of his films employing a strong typography-only titles and intertitles. They are almost a self-sufficient entity, another character in the movie, another comment. This film present a collage of some of the lettering from Godard’s impressive body of work, including some classics such as Pierre le Fou, Weekend, Numero deux, etc. along with some short and documentary rarities. But only the text over black or imaged background are taken into consideration -as Godard’s contemporary Michael Snow put it in his own minimal “text film”: so is this!
gonzalohrodriguez.net 