Carroll / Fletcher

Jeannette Ehlers – a double bill

Jeannette-Ehlsers-Black-Magic-at-the-White-House-3

Black Magic At The White House

2009, 03’46”

SYNOPSIS

In Black Magic at the White House (2009) Ehlers performs a voudou dance in the Danish mansion Marienborg, which has a strong connection to the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Marienborg was built as a summer residence for the Commander Olfert Fischer in 1744. Several other of the period’s trading men have owned and put their stamp on Marienborg, and today it still plays an important role in Denmark, as the official residence of the country’s prime minister.

 

black bullets2

Black Bullets

2012, 4’33”

 

SYNOPSIS

Black Bullets (2012) was filmed on location in Haiti and is inspired by The Haitian Revolution.  On the 14th August 1791 the calls of Liberté, Eqalité, Fraternité echoing in the streets of Paris are heard across the Atlantic by the African slaves in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (Haiti).  The slave revolt of 1791 culminated in the defeat of the French at the Battle of Vertieres in November 1803, and the abolition of slavery and foundation of the independent republic of Haiti – the world’s first black republic and the only state to be formed through a successful slave revolt.

But the rebellion began with the legendary Vodou ceremony Bois Caïman in the northern part of Saint-Domingue. A black pig materialized and was sacrificed in a ritual in which hundreds of slaves drank the pig’s blood. The blood gave them power to fight for freedom.

Black Bullets is a tribute to this act of revolt.

JEANNETTE EHLERS

Jeannette Ehlers is based in Copenhagen, Denmark.  Her works revolve around the transatlantic slave trade and draw on the artist’s own ethnic background, a Danish mother and a Father from Trinidad, to investigate questions of meaning and identity.

LINKS

Artists Website 

Details of Say It Loud, Ehlers 2014 solo show at Nikolaj Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center, can be found here.

William Raban 72-82

Looking forward to the pv of William Raban’s new film 72-82 at the Hackney Picturehouse on Friday.  Fortunately, it’s also screened on 13 Oct. as part of the BFI London Film Festival – details here.

If you can get hold of the winter 2012 issue of no.where’s magazine Sequence, there’s an interesting article by Raban – Politics and Experimental Film – A Personal View.  Here’s a few quotes as a taster:

“Four principles of political filmmaking:

(1) reflexivity: active audience participation rather than passive spectatorship;

(2) relexivity: revealing the modes of production rather than concealing them;

(3) relexivity: as understood in the social sciences – the effect that the researcher [film-maker] has on their subjects [content and audience];

(4) an ethical dimension of aesthetics – appearance determined by material conditions of production, it is not the pursuit of style.” Willam Raban.

“Art does not do politics by reaching the real. It does it by inventing fictions that challenge the existing distribution of the real and the fictional.” Jacques Ranciere.

“The problem is not to make political films, but to make films politically.” Jean-Luc Godard.

 

 

Lou Reed’s Berlin

Watching Lou Reed’s BERLIN – a film by Julian Schnabel (2007), I’m reminded of a comment by Robert Hughes as quoted in David Markson’s this is not a novel:

“There are so few people who know how to make art.

– Julian Schnabel.

One less than he thinks. – Robert Hughes”

Rather than classic concert films such as Jonathon Demme and Talking Head’s Stop Making Sense (1984) and D A Pennebaker’s Ziggy Stardust (1983).