Keith Sanborn : Energy of Delusion
March 15th Aptril 30th 2014 Opening March 15th from 5PM to 9PM
Keith Sanborn is an american filmmaker who thought his works invest the question of representations shapen by the multiple uses of movie making. Artist and midia theoretician, since the 70′s he has questionned cinema in order to create field of thinking around the representation that are induces by cinema. In this way, cinema and memory of the cinema is taking a priviledged space within its own work.
His strong attraction for diversion asserts itself throught his films and resonnate in the translation and film curating that he has made aound Situationism and Lettrism… His works is nourished by hacking and appropriation of iconic sequences of film such as The Zaprudder footage, or the Killing of Sadam Hussein, as much as it is with the appropriation of shots to who we do not pay attention to, being iflooded within the narrative stream of the film. The Gillian Hills Trilogy hightlights an underestimated actress. The filmmaker gives back to life part of a forgotten or deliberately disregard cinema history. His works offer new readings through film adaptations, decodifications of promotion films (such as in Operation double Trouble) or by using compression as transcriptions of keyworks of the cinema ( such an in Energy of Dellusion).
For several years, the question of the history of the cinema became a major stake for the artist. In 1988 in a manifesto, hijacking Louis Lumière and Hollis Frampton, he wrote that ” the cinema is an invention without history “. Since then, his work focused on the possibility of realizing stories of the cinema, by sounding and by deceiving established film forms. So one might understand the use of the random forms chosse by the artist and that generate work without any ending.
Two Installations
Energy of Delusion
This project of 60 one-minute films (2 minutes each with the titles), called “Energy Of Delusion” takes its title from Tol’stoy’s phrase, which became the title of Shklovsky’s critical magnum opus, where that one word, though never spelled out, might finally reach intuition.
My aim is to create a highly compressed museum of cinema, consisting of some of the most notoriously engaging, difficult, and lengthy works of film history—those nearly invisible works that explore the limit conditions of film. Works that have become invisible precisely because of their status as “classics.” The experiment is to see just what comes to light when these works are compressed into a familiar yet brief span of time, where one might hold the whole film in memory at once, or refresh one’s memory in a Proustian rush of images, or simply experience that energy of delusion.
The titles of the individual works in the project are meant as encryptions of the titles of the original films and give information about the factor of compression involved in reducing them to a minute of screen time.
One installation might be a row of 60 identical flat-screen monitors side by side along a long wall, or other configuration appropriate to the space involved. An alternate possibility would be a large blackbox single screen projection where the 60 works would be projected endlessly in random order. In the single channel versions—both linear and random—the quotes from Tol’stoy and Shklovsky are interpolated into the work.
The Gillian Hills Trilogy
The Gillian Hills Trilogy began as the pursuit of an adolescent obsession with Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, and in particular with the speeded-up three-way sex scene. I had become obsessed in particular with the blonde. When I identified her as Gillian Hills, further research lead me to realize she was portrayed in a very similar predicament in Antonioni’s Blow-Up, this time with a brunette wig. Kubrick’s version was, then, a dystopian restaging of the Antonioni film. Further questions opened out onto Gillian Hills’s significant career in music and her feature film debut Beat Girl. While the latter film is grimly exploitative, Hills, in this role, ironically has a greater agency than in the cinéma d’auteur where I had first encountered her. I made interventions in each film, which are intended to lay bare directorial strategies and release the extraordinary and largely uncelebrated talent of Gillian Hills.
The Gillian Hills Trilogy is a three-part project celebrating the screen presence of Gillia Hills in three of her most widely seen but unrecognized roles A Clockwork Orange, Blow-Up, and Beat Girl. In her peripheral roles in Kubrick’s and Antonioni’s films—which became iconic moments for the films she is invisible in plain sight, barely even credited. In Edmond T. Gréville’s lurid Beat Girl, she plays the title rôle and ironically enjoys not only name recognition but vastly greater agency.
I formulated a specific intervention for each film: in part one, Impersonal Memory… I attempt to restore the original speed to the time-lapse clip of A Clockwork Orange, in part two, Aspects… I select only the scenes in which Gillian or, arguably, her shadow appear and reorder them randomly, and in part three: B.G.B.G. I create a pseudo- anaglyph monstrosity by synching Roger Corman’s American release cut with the original at a key point in the film.
These interventions are intended to lay bare directorial strategies and release into visibility the extraordinary and largely uncelebrated talent of Gillian Hills. K.S.
March 20th 7PM : Keith Sanborn speak about The détournement within Guy Debord and René Vienet.
April 10th 7PM : Keith Sanborn in context by yann beauvais with works by Guy Debord, Bruce Conner, Hollis Frampton, Esfer Schub, Les Levine, Peggy Ahwesh…..
Keith Sanborn
born 1952 in Wichita, Kansas.
Live between Catskill, Brooklyn and Princeton. Work with film since 1978
Since 2002 he teaches at Princeton University, and since 2004 a the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College. He has translated the works of Guy Debord, René Vienet, Georges Batalaille, Napoléon, Lev Kuleshov, Harum Faroki, Esfir Schub and Paolo Gioli. Write for Art Forum.
Book organized
Vertov From Z to A, organição Peggy Ahwesh & Keith Sanborn, Ediciones La Calavera, New York 2007
Napoleon : How to Make A War, Ediciones La Cavalera New York 1998
Craig Baldwin : Tribulation 99, Alien Anomalies Under America, Ediciones La Cavalera New York 1991