CINEMA PARENTHÈSE and iMAL present CLAUDINE EIZYKMAN (1945-2018).

Eizykman was a major figure of the French experimental film renaissance since the Seventies. She was filmmaker, theoretician, and professor of cinema at Paris VIII Vincennes University, co-founder of the Paris Films Co-op (1974) and of Cinedoc (1979).

In her book La Jouissance-cinéma (1975) Eizykman takes as a starting point the thought of the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard to develop a theory about how experimental cinema, with its enormous kinetic potential, opens the doors to a new mode of perception, which she calls ‘cinema-jouissance’: a cinema that intensifies the affects, producing pleasure, restlessness or even nausea.

Eizykman put her theory into practice through her own films. Her cinematographic works are marked by a complexity in the very sophisticated construction of images and have been considered among the most original and aesthetically successful of French experimental cinema of the 1970s and 1980s. In V. W. Vitesse Women (1972-1974), included in this program, the rapid, alternating montage, overlays and expressive use of grain aims to break the schemes of industrial narrative cinema and address new ways of relating with images at a purely perceptual level.

This programme also includes the full version of Bruine Squamma (1972-77) (bruine: a kind of mist that absorbs and reflects light, and squama: a sliver of the epidermis, shed from the skin), is, in Boris Lehman’s description, ”impressive for the way it is organised and its jamming of a series of sporadic images, infinitely repeated and varied, with no narrative impulse whatsoever. Nothing but flashes, explosions, extinctions, splashes of images which succeed one another, shift forward or back, are superimposed, as in a game of transparent cards."

As a filmmaker Eizykman was awarded the Jury Prize at the Knokke-le-Zoute International Experimental Film Festival in the 1974-1975 edition.

INTRODUCTION
Daniel A. Swarthnas (Cinema Parenthèse)

V.W. VITESSE WOMEN
1972-1974 | 16mm | color | silent | 36'00

BRUINE SQUAMMA
1972-77 | 16mm | color | silent | 120'00

Film prints from Cinédoc Paris Film Coop.

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.