La flèche du Parthe

As part of our autumn programme dedicated to film & language, Art Cinema OFFoff presents ​‘La flèche du Parthe’ in collaboration with the publishing house het balanseer, which has been publishing (linguistically) innovative literature, essay writing, artist publications, and music since 2007.

The evening is built around the film La flèche (2021) by Vincent Geyskens and Jan Op de Beeck¹. This film was first screened last year as part of Vincent Geyskens’ exhibition at M Leuven. The frenetic and concentrated montage of primarily found imagery & sound conjures up motifs of the fascinated petrified gaze, tragedy, banter and spectacle, the shadow of the Antique, the fertile and the statuesque, the damp and the dry, ancient melancholy and ever-fresh jitters.

The first film shown in this programme will be Mayhem (Abigail Child, 1987), part six of Is This What You Were Born For?, a seven-part series that intensely twists and questions our intimate situationality. ​“I used the film as an opportunity to explore noir lighting and to reshoot noir from a feminist, anarchist position. I had multiple heroines, impossible plots, and organised the ​“scenario” around the sound tracks from Mexican cable television soap operas, abetted with recordings of my own and, ultimately, a session with four downtown musicians: Shelley Hirsch, Christian Marclay, Charles Noyes, and Zeena Parkins. The work explored the film gaze, then the obsessive subject of theorists, pushing at the boundaries or contradictions of the contemporary discussion” (Child, 2005).

Afterwards, Veva Leye² will read vleeskersen/​noordkrieken, poetry she wrote to accompany La flèche. The obtuse and arcane, sogginess and criticism are intimately intertwined in a game with impersonal language that simultaneously strikes a distinct note on everyone.

La flèche will be followed by Bassae (Jean-Daniel Pollet, 1964). After Méditerranée (1963) — screened at OFFoff two years ago — Pollet returned to the Mediterranean, by his own account obsessed with the Greek archaeological site Bassae, around a Doric temple. The text provided by the voice in Bassae (1964) was not written by Philippe Sollers this time, but by Alexandre Astruc. Here too, history articulates itself in its mythic, poetic dimension, not so much shown and told, but evoked and made tangible, an oppressive heaviness that continues to disappear.

The programme closes with Ein Tag im Leben der Endverbraucher (1993), for which Harun Farocki drew on three decades of advertising films. Farocki takes the scenarios and especially the concrete images that take place in the apparent but constitutive margins of the advertised product very seriously. He traces the interplay of compression and shifting that raises the ideology of bourgeois life, and articulates the very fabric of the dream that is (consumer) life.

In collaboration with publishing house het balanseer

In the presence of Vincent Geyskens, Jan Op de Beeck, and Veva Leye

¹Motril, vrucht en pose (image collages by Vincent Geyskens and text by Jan Op de Beeck, het balanseer, 2012); Op stijgend vocht (poetry by Vincent Geyskens, with imagery by Jan Op de Beeck, het balanseer, 2015); Het geslacht van de paling (Vincent Geyskens, het balanseer, 2021).

²HAP AX LE GO ME NON (Veva Leye, het balanseer, 2018).

On Sabzian, you will find an interview with Abigail Child translated by Veva Leye & Jan Op de Beeck, as well as a text by Jan Op de Beeck on Mayhem.