Locarno Shorts Weeks 2024

«This is what a real man looks like, not like you, fucking bitch!»

[…] Les dieux du supermarché entremêle des vidéos trouvées sur YouTube, des images recherchées par mots-clefs et des extraits de films pornographiques. Le tout s’articule au moyen de la voix d’Alberto Gonzalez Morales, qui nous partage ses questionnement intimes concernant la représentation des corps masculins. « En tant qu’homme cisgenre homosexuel, la perception de mon propre corps et celle que j’ai du corps des autres hommes est très formatée par la publicité, la mode et la pornographie ». L’essai d’Alberto Gonzalez Morales aborde la frustration face à la puissance qu’exercent ces images sur son identité et ses désirs. Il y raconte l’impression constante de devoir ressembler à ces corps mais aussi la difficulté à trouver un autre type de corps attirant. […] (MF)

Read the entire interview by Morgane Frund HERE

Alberto Gonzalez Morales | CH 2022 | 8’
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I’ve always been fond of essential ideas about cinema; yet I believe none. There are many such ideas in filmmaking nowadays, as in general the act of making images becomes one with that of seeing images, and eventually of understanding images. Kamal Aljafari’s Paradiso, XXXI, 108 – a found footage experiment (see below) – and Gorana Jovanović’s Balls (Lopte) – an “impure” observational documentary – are explorations of seemingly opposed aspects of cinema, yet perfectly complementary: inside and outside the shot, pro-filmic and hors-champ.

Jovanović opens her film with a recording of a famous football match from the historical 1990–1991 Yugoslav Cup, with Hajduk Split (Croatia) against Partizan Belgrade (Serbia) at Poljud Stadium when ultras took over the pitch and burned the Yugoslavian flag live on television. Decades later, the military football teams of several ex-Yugoslav countries get together for a football game in Sarajevo, swapping one uniform for another, yet still embodying the very same violent tension of boys with toys. The art of war, the art of football, both a masculine art of Balls... Jovanović’s film is quite confusing and raw, and it couldn’t be otherwise: not knowing who’s who is a strange occurrence in watching any kind of choreography of uniforms, and part of the ambiguity of the real that the director explores. Intuition, however, what Roland Barthes called “stadium”, never fails – an image of two different military uniforms coexisting is coded into a conflictual image, a landscape of suspense, just as an image of two different football uniforms. Obviously, Balls could’ve been a film about camaraderie and fair play, a Manichean depiction of sports in times of war and peace. But not under Jovanović’s glance: while being intrigued by the ambiguity of the real, taking one of its farces as the subject of her film, there’s little ambiguity in her mise-en-scène: watching men in (military) uniforms sitting up in a balcony while themselves are watching other men in (football) uniforms playing is no less than a chilling view, an infinite mirror of conformism and mass ornament that is only amplified at the end of the film with the ultras’ march to the stadium. (CB)

Gorana Jovanović | SRB-SVN 2022 | 23’
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Quoting its title from an obscure short text of Borges about the unattainable image of God, Kamal Aljafari’s Paradiso, XXXI, 108 is a whispered incantation known only to Aljafari himself, yet having great effect on others. The darkness of a desert at night hides the severe looks and silhouettes of tens of young soldiers. As the sun rises, the film becomes a bizarre symphony of faded magenta light, bombastic zoom-ins, invaded landscape, and firm gestures, an action film of action for action’s sake, a war film without enemies. It’s a brilliantly malicious montage of strangely lyrical and sensual (man & machine) instants of aestheticizing war at large, with “the world's most moral army” – the Israelian one – as its doomed showman. In Aljafari’s vision, all these images come together in a rehearsal of war, a trailer. If the contemporary mise-en-scène of war is shot/reverse shot, Paradiso, XXXI, 108 confuses its viewer by only showing shots, knowing there's a century-old intuition of the hors-champ, present in our culture’s visual consciousness ever since the First World War. The enemy could be surrounding the frame: the pro-filmic is safe, visually conquered, while the unknown hors-champ is dangerous (horror cinema understood this best). I actually spent much time watching early war newsreels from that period: it’s as if Paradiso invokes that visual era of re-enactment and imagination when an enemy was self-evident and an intertitle could’ve changed an entire course of history. That era, of course, never ended. (CB)

Kamal Aljafari | DE-PSE 2022 | 18’
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Militant filmmakers Elisabeth Perceval and Nicolas Klotz have a style of their own. For them, always on the run to the margins of politics, everything is cinema, no matter the screen, the angle, the length etc. Nevertheless they are filmmakers of didactic structures, and their cinema is a constant in-betweenness of poetic vigour and journalistic rigor.

Chant pour la ville enfouie (Song for the Buried City) reaffirms it all. I’ve never felt close to Perceval and Klotz, but I’ve always respected them as filmmakers who keep on being true to themselves and their angry-humanist cinema. Shot in the Calais Jungle, the French refugee camp demolished in 2016, the film is divided into two parts, beginning with long, steady shots of the unrecognizable landscape accompanied by a written slow poem-turned-narrative about displacement, vanishing memory and eventually the First Libyan Civil War. The contemplative stillness, doubled by the paralyzing sadness of the on-screen lyrics, anticipates the unexpected power of a tracking shot: at first lingering on the sea, then going up to the sky while the lyrics turn from poetry to numbers and dates – «351.673 people flee (…), March 26th 2am (…), in the dark, 70 women and men aged 20 to 25, 2 children», etc. It’s a primordial cinema, one of simplicity and efficiency, that the two have been doing for four decades, as if the children of Joris Ivens.

The second part is even simpler, as it documents the previous life of migrants in the Calais Jungle, one of serenity and worry, with some wonderful moments of community: dancing, playing with sunlight, but also protesting as the French authorities are evacuating the camp. Throughout the film there's a sense of conflict between a strict structure and a rather loose use of time – in other words, that it takes too long - but a certain moment explains it all: two young boys hold a poster in their hands that says: «We are not dangerous». Only a few minutes later, the two boys start laughing, some of the most candid laughter I’ve seen in cinema. Perceval and Klotz know too well the power of a few extra seconds. (CB)

Elisabeth Perceval, Nicolas Klotz | FR 2022 | 43’
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Just imagine that our own lives would be faithfully mirrored in this second life video game: the film essay would become an ethical focus, and a profound reflection, on the background figures that are part of our own daily landscape as a commodified labour force. Beside this brilliant anti-capitalistic thread we also discover an existentialist line that emerges from these non-playable characters (NPCs to gamers), for programmed slavery implies moments of indefinite suspension. Do we dare to see ourselves in them? (GDS)

Total Refusal | AT 2022 | 20’
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