(…) As if there were an opening, an opening like a gathering together, like a world, where something can happen, many things can happen, where there’s a lot, there’s a swarm of possibilities, where everything tingles with possibilities, where the person I can vaguely hear walking around next door might ring the bell, might come in, might burn the place up, might climb on the roof, might throw himself screaming out the window. Might everything, anything, without choosing and without any one action preferred over any other. (…)

[Might, might, might.] p.197, Darkness Moves, an Henri Michaux anthology 1927-1984. translated by David ball. 1994 University of california press. Berkeley and LAin With Mescaline, “Miserable Miracle”, Henri Michaux

This movie could be a contemporary adaptation to film of what an Oulipo group meeting would have looked like back in the days.

In the film, Von Trier forces Jorgen Leth – once his mentor and referenced director – to re-shoot 'The Perfect Human' one of the latter' first films. 'The Perfect Human' would have to be re-directed five times each through a different grid of escalating complexity and obtrusion, of ever more obstacles and complications drawn by Trier. Each step induces in the older director moments of creative catharsis.

Von Trier forces in Leth spontaneity and more basic levels of creative consciousness. The older director does not fail and manages to deliver plausible solutions sedimented in many years of experience.

At the end of the film it is understood that 'director directs director' structure does not fall far from any other structure of creative making: choice-making, start from scratch, formats and representational framing.

During the 1982 edition of Cannes Film Festival Wim Wenders booked a hotel room and equipped it with a 16 mm camera and a list of questions such as 'Is cinema a language about to get lost, an art about to die?'. He then invited some of his filmmaking contemporaries to face the camera and individually respond to his questions. Spielberg, Herzog, Fassbinder, Godard and Antonioni were some of the contributors.

Wenders made good use of the context of the festival – rich ground for then contemporary cultural representation – and orchestrated the documentation of his own perspective of the whole thing; not in relation to the possible future of cinema (rhetorically speculative) but to the condition of what that format was then and there.

This movie is not about the big things, it is about a small house. (Filósofo Franco Berardi ‘Bifo’, from the Italian Autonomia)

The movie Il Trasloco (Moving Out Of The Future) was filmed inside a house in Bologna that functioned for decades as home to the Autonomia Italiana.

(aka Pós-Trópicos & Antropofagismos)

Try to watch the whole movie. In a similar style to Klaus Kinski in a film by Herzog in Episode III a character tries to persuade locals from a village in Congo to make use of their own poverty as one of the country's natural resources. The fitzcarraldian lunatic convinces the Congolese to compete with the thorough documentation performed daily by international photographers and well-known NGO's. He suggests self-documentation - the bigger the bellies and the sparklier the eyes the better - to be sold in the open international news market; and a subsequent first-hand use of their own natural resources.

On the other hand, Renzo Martens applies to himself the same method he criticizes: he is documenting locally and exhibiting foreignly. This is something he makes explicit at various points during the film. He does not intend to exhibit the film locally to those who were portrayed but to follow the same path as any other image bred from that country and exhibit it to the rich and famous and profuse milieu of international galleries and art fairs. Good.

How do you do a show if you don’t have art? Use copies. How do you get copies? Find photographs of the original art. So that’s what Ms. Bancroft and Mr. Nesbett did. They photocopied illustrations of existing, or once existing, Hammons pieces from books and magazines, and downloaded other images from the Internet. They then taped the 8½-by-11-inch prints to the gallery walls.

Read the original here.

Peckham is a mainly Jamaican-descentent neighborhood in South London.

Developed by an anthropologist as a mechanism to document the others.

A genuine gesture and no pre-meditated anthropological strategy. Makes you want to make.