Please join us for a late afternoon with a full programme of book presentations and video screenings; The Dark Pages is PrintRoom’s programme as part of the 43rd International Film Festival Rotterdam.
From 5 – 8 pm at PrintRoom
Presentation runs until 8 February
Featuring:
~The Dark Galleries by Steven Jacobs & Lisa Colpaert
~Thing by Anouk De Clercq
~Eine Landschaft der wilden, nackten, grimmigen Menschenfresser-Leute by Maaike Gouwenberg and Joris Lindhout
& The Flip Collection IV ; a selection of PrintRoom’s growing, international collection of flipbooks
For the occasion we selected books by artists and theoreticians who deal with the relations between film, art and history. They will shed some light on darker histories, moving between the age of discoveries and animation, film noir and painting, and between architecture and fiction.
Eine Landschaft der wilden, nackten, grimmigen Menschenfresser-Leute
More info on:
The Dark Galleries
Imagine a museum in which the portrait of Carlotta Valdes, an important prop in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, hangs on a wall next to the painted portrait of the title character of Otto Preminger’s Laura and opposite the uncanny portraits of the desired or murdered women in Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street, George Cukor’s Gaslight, and Nicholas Ray’s Born to Be Bad. In an adjacent gallery, the visitor of this imaginary museum can contemplate the portraits of patriarchs that feature in films such as House of Strangers, Suspicion, Gilda, and Strangers on a Train. This is precisely the concept of this book. Dark Galleries deals with American (and some British) films of the 1940s and 1950s, in which a painted portrait plays an important part in the plot or the mise-en-scène. Particularly noir crime thrillers, gothic melodramas, and ghost stories feature painted portraits that seem to have a magical power over their beholders. Apart from an extensive introductory essay, this museum guide presents more than eighty entries on the artistic and cinematic aspects of noir painted portraits.
The Noir Art compilation video by Karel de Cock and Steven Jacobs will play at PrintRoom until 8 February.
Nicolas Provost’s film The Dark Galleries is based on the book. It will be screened at the IFFR.
Thing
An architect talks about the city he has built. Gradually we realize that the city is imaginary. His account is an attempt to give his ideas a fixed shape. This, in a nutshell, is the story of Thing, a book and video by artist Anouk De Clercq. Thing is part of “The art of ~scaping” , a research project funded by the Research Fund University College Ghent. Thing is the first book in the “The art of ~scaping” series. It accompanies the video Thing, made in collaboration with Scanner (soundtrack) and Scanlabprojects (images), screening at the IFFR. The images in the book are from the video, as is the text, there featured as a monologue.
The Dark Galleries and Thing are published by MER. Paper Kunsthalle and part of the Ara MER series; books with a focus on artistic research.
Eine Landschaft der wilden, nackten, grimmigen Menschenfresser-Leute is a flipbook inspired by the story of Hans Staden, the first German explorer to write about the cannibals living in the Atlantic Rainforest along the coast of Brazil. During their search for the book ‘O gótico Brasileiro’ (Brazilian Gothic), Maaike Gouwenberg and Joris Lindhout looked into the different histories that developed the idea of cultural cannibalism, which became most apparent in the ideas of ‘Antropofagia’, but also in the darker and social political and critical films of José Mojíca Marins aka Zé do Caixão, a true Brazilian Gothic filmmaker.
Eine Landschaft der wilden, nackten, grimmigen Menschenfresser-Leute is PrintRoom Publication # 12