Circles of Cinema

This program looks into the layered relations between feminism and cinema. More specifically the organisation of bodies and identities, specific to cinema’s production and exhibition, that comes with it.

• Book presentation The Dimensions of Difference – Caroline Godart
• Screening and presentation Alliances (2018) – Alex Martinis Roe
• Conversation between Caroline Godart and Alex Martinis Roe (English spoken)

In her book The Dimensions of Difference – Space, Time and Bodies in Women’s Cinema and Continental Philosophy Godart writes a feminist film critique exploring the question time, space and bodies in women’s cinema. With close readings of the works of Luce Irigaray, Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson she analyses for instance the editing and camerawork in Claire Denis’s Good Work and Trouble Every Day, Lucrecia Martel’s The Holy Girl and Jane Campion’s The Piano. The book investigates how certain films generate a cinematic experience of sexual difference, and frames this analysis within a careful philosophical enquiry into the notion of alterity itself.

Since her project To Become Two (2014−2017) Alex Martinis Roe researches the relational herstories of different feminist collectives in Europe and Australia. With her new film Alliances she continues that research and interviews ten committed feminists from Paris. Together they explore the legacy of the Women’s Liberatation Movement that began in 1968 in Paris. The film points to the necessity to form an alliance – a solidarity-in-difference – between different feminist movements. The film is shot in the Centre Pompidou, Université Paris VIII and the surrounding suburb of Saint Denis and becomes an analysis of the relation between centre and periphery in the city, and its entanglement with these issues within feminist politics. (http://​www​.alexmartinisroe​.com)

The program is part of the program of Kunsthal Gent. During the autumn of 2018 Kunsthal Gent invites several guests to support and inform the intentions of the project. As a structural partner of Kunsthal Ghent, Art Cinema OFFoff wants to help think about the kind of collective space (a) cinema can provide. As much with film as the exhibition of it.

Program: Sven Dehens