Guest: Louis Gahide – Brutalités amoureuses

Drawing on the notion of the archive as a living artwork, Brutalités amoureuses rejects static preservation in favor of critical transformation. The original 35mm footage of a 1970s sexploitation film has been radically reworked: human figures are removed, the sound erased, and the narrative – in the form of subtitles – dismantled. What remains is a spectral trace: fragmented scenes that gesture towards the original without reproducing it. Here, exploitation cinema becomes raw material – not for a homage, but for an autopsy.

A slightly slo-mo, optical reprint of an obviously ill-treated ​’70s porn movie in which the chemical rot that’s already eaten away the edges of the image threaten to censor it entirely. Dedicated to sexploitation icon Doris Wishman. 

Tugging Diary documents a footbridge in Hong Kong during the period of protest, rallies and strikes between August 2019 to January 2021. Both the internet and physical spaces act as critical communication platforms. Information circulates more widely and rapidly outside the mainstream media. These messages are continuously being altered, removed, renewed or overlaid with other information.

Quand les lesbiennes se font du cinéma (QLFC) collective transforms the male characters of a classic western into women and lesbian couples by painting on the film stock. ​“Made without a camera using found footage scraps, we subverted the heterosexual imagery. We came together to scrape, color, mask, erase, draw over and add to the existing images.”

Rosalind Krauss wrote in reference to the work of Cy Twombly: ​“the formal character of the graffito is that of a violation, the trespass onto a space that is not the graffitist’s own, the desecration of a field originally consecrated to another purpose, the effacement of that purpose through the act of dirtying, smearing, scarring, jabbing”. This could also be said of the films of Cathy Joritz, who uses various direct-on-film animation techniques to penetrate and appropriate the existing images on the celluloid.

Give AIDS the Freeze is an extremely entertaining scratch film. To the tune of Frank Sinatra’s ​“Strangers in the Night”, it provides some sober advice on how to stop the spread of the AIDS virus – get informed; choose your lovers carefully; don’t forget the condoms and insist that he wear one!

An exuberant exploration of found-footage collage, cut-out animation and hand-painted film, Altitude Zero celebrates the achievements of pioneering female pilot Amelia Earhart. The film interweaves archival footage of her with images of women conforming to conventional feminine ideals, from beauty pageants to domestic training. Earhart’s disappearance remains one of aviation history’s greatest unsolved mysteries.