Name: Cinema Parenthèse #27
Start: 2021-09-26
Location: iMAL

Cinema Parenthèse is a platform that invites alternative filmmakers and screens films in their original format. For this edition, they invite Bruce McClure & Alex Mendizabal.

For over twenty years Bruce McClure has been making performances that explore the fundamentals of the experience of projected film, where often the technology is modified and augmented so that it becomes arguable whether we are seeing a ‘film’ or something else.

In this new work Bruce McClure will perform with four fans, loudspeakers and 16mm film projector and loops. This will be preceded with a new work by Alex Mendizabal, the details of which will declare themselves during the event itself.

Bruce McClure

"TOWER Chamber scene. Boxed. Ordinary bedroom set.
Slipping through those and playing down from the conning towers all differing as clocks from keys since nobody appeared to have the same time. Rotables, have quadrants in its title chances to long on but stands up to legs is escape master-in-chief from all sorts of places broached by the spin of towers amid the lampless. Casting swan beams on sends whispers up frau-frau's frou-frous; arranging tumblers on table. Ah ho ! Fontmouther."

Alex Mendizabal

Countless amounts of films (doesn't make it digital): decrementi frequenziali.
Cinema as a fraud.

Cinema Parenthèse

Cinema Parenthèse is a platform in Brussels, Belgium that invites alternative filmmakers and screens films in their original format. The screenings are based on a dialectical montage, the collision between single films and different film programmes, an ongoing series about investigating different film strategies in political and aesthetic manners.

Cinema Parenthèse is interested in filmmakers and individual films that want to go beyond - based on different practices - ethnographic and anthropological studies, field and archival work. Films that can be understood as an experimentation with the discovery and unveiling of places and people, acting as a melting pot for various social, political and cultural specificities and cross-cultural experiences. Camera positioning, architecture of the image, the pro-filmic (everything in front of and registered by the camera), the non-diegetic, the soundtrack, politico-cultural diversity and the challenges in representation are central concerns in the films we shall screen. Films which refers to a rethinking of both aesthetics and cultural representation, and show its ability to see film as cultural representation – as opposed to seeing through film. The resistance to the salvage paradigm lies not in abandoning its allegorical structure but by opening the mind’s eye to different histories, and seeks ways of revising the production of otherness in the representation. To deal with history and to overcome the binary oppositions in us and them and self and the others is also of vital interest within our project.

Cinema Parenthèse is also interested in film as structure or structure as film. Films that use different methods (optical printing, refilming, color separation, loops, superimposition) to manipulate and transform short film sequences or single frames in a structural and time-based manner. Cinema Parenthèse focuses on structural materiality, film as film and film as materiality. Films that - with different methods - bring out how deconstruction of the original material results in unexpected constellations and visual rebuilding for a 'new' film structure.