Baaaa: Inauguration new cinema seating

“An experiment in ovine geometry.” Cyriak Harris is a British animator and internet phenomenon. Baaa has amassed more than 100 million views.

A series of seven in-camera edited Super‑8 reels, Bobinas ovinas 1 – 7 began with the correlation between wool spinning and the film rolling pace. It was shot with the black head Carranza sheep and the community of the Karrantza Valley in Biscay, Basque Country. Bruno Delgado Ramo (Una película en color, 2019) is a Spanish filmmaker, artist-researcher and architect. In 2019, he was a resident at WIELS, Brussels.

Between 1954 and 1959, Vittorio De Seta shot ten extraordinary documentary shorts in locations around Sicily, Sardinia and Calabria. ​“I don’t think I’ve discovered anything as surprising or enriching as [these] films. (…) They are all roughly ten minutes in length and the level of poetic compression is as high as in the best D.W. Griffith shorts. Within the rhythms of exalted dailiness proper to each film there are images that are heart-stopping, sheep passing across a snow-flecked mountainside in Pastori di Orgosolo, which may be the most glorious of the shorts, or the shepherd leaving the cold outside for the fire-lit warmth inside his hut.” (Kent Jones, Sight & Sound)

Restored 35mm print from the Cineteca di Bologna!

“How to speak of his films? Of the image, pulsating like the oscillations of an electrocardiogram? And of the sound, true echo of space? How can one forget the beginning of The Seasons? Armenian shepherds and their animals caught in a torrent where they may be drowning, head over heels? Peasants fleeing before unleashed haystacks or hurtling down slopes, here of snow, there of rock? This brief intertitle fallen from the sky: ​“This is the land.” But it is a land with no North, filmed, perhaps, from the viewpoint of a meteorite which doesn’t know where it falls.” (Serge Daney)

A man on horseback herds his sheep through through magic hour in rural Montana. A twilight pastoral from the co-director of Leviathan (2012), Sweetgrass (2009) and De Humani Corporis Fabrica (2022). ​“The film is at once at the threshold of the visible and at the threshold of the technological, pushing the camera’s sensors and automation beyond their capabilities. (…) The work has five discrete channels of sound and in many ways sound is more important than picture. (…) To show the film in a non-surround theater, which seems the norm for avant-garde and documentary screenings, is like cutting off more than half their limbs.” (LCT) We screen the film with our brand new 5.1 surround sound system!

Droopy is a shepherd. His sheep graze into cattle country, despite the warning sign. He gets in an argument with the cattle ranching wolf, but of course, nobody wins a battle against Droopy. A true Tex Avery classic.