MOVIOLA DESASTRE. DORMIR, FOTOCOPIAR, ARCHIVAR. CINE VIEJO Y CINE NUEVO

• 11 pm Mosaik Mécanique (2007). Director: Norbert Pfaffenbichler. (10 )
• 11:30 pm. Wide Awake (2006). Director: Alan Berliner (80 )

As a prologue to the session, an extreme sample of the possibilities for using the editing table, a reckless appetiser that plays with Charles Chaplin, a veritable myth in the history of film, to the crazed beat of the most hallucinogenic experimental cinema.

Mosaik Mécanique. Tribute to the Ballet Mécanique (1924) by Fernand Léger, in his quest to achieve a pure and autonomous art by rewriting a short film by Charlie Chaplin, A Film Johnnie (1914), until it becomes a mass of objectives and movements in CinemaScope. A new way of projecting and perceiving the original work by taking it apart and putting it back together again.

Norbert Pfaffenbichler, artist, filmmaker and programmer, is one of the proponents of found footage. He was born in Steyr, Austria in 1967 and studied at the University of Applied Arts of Vienna. Since 2001, he has worked as an artist and curator and has participated in festivals like Toronto, Rotterdam and Sonar, among many others.

In Wide Awake (2006), Alan Berliner takes an in-depth, documentary look at the issue of identity. This New York producer weaves Wide Awake with the plot of his own insomnia. The birth of his second child ends up capturing the camera lens in the second part of the film. Probably one of the most fun-filled and fascinating documentaries in recent years, it harnesses his insomnia as a source of creativity and at the same time as a source of problems in his family life. Working at night as his family sleeps, and sleeping during the day as his family lives. A white film for La noche en blanco, the white night.

Alan Berliner. Perhaps the natural editor, the man without a camera. A New York archivist, compulsive collector and obsessive accumulator of lost images, he is one of the most preeminent makers of the kind of documentary that has rewritten its own definition so much that it has become a mutant genre in which private life, foreign images, essay and humour are all mixed together. Berliner is also one of the most precise editors in contemporary film, a true defender of moviola editing, cutting and pasting the celluloid with his hands in an against-the-current defence of an instrument, the moviola, which has been cast aside in the wake of digital technologies.

One of the documentary film directors who has managed to merge the traditions of auteur cinema and experimental film under the quality hallmark of HBO, reaching audiences that others wouldn’t have access to. In his latest film, he personifies the family and artistic drama of someone who works by night and never manages to live by day.