In matters of the heart, one must “Be patient,” opines a mysterious text in David Gatten’s love-letter film, How to Conduct a Love Affair. A wistful serenity guides this programme through the magnificent mysteries of artistic inspiration, the indescribable melancholy that limns romantic love, the quiet solitude that grief commands and our insatiable quest for knowledge – in short, sentiments that are endlessly lost and found.
With L’Atelier, we begin in Hannes Schüpbach’s Paris studio as the artist punctuates moments of artistic creation with repose. An uncontainable rhythm emerges as views through the atelier’s antique windows of Paris’s famous rooftops and manicured parks form a painterly counterpoint to the artist’s immaterial imagination.
Art and life further coalesce in Charlotte Pryce’s The Parable of the Tulip Painter and the Fly as both painting and film are imbued with intoxicating colour and the velvety texture of a Dutch still life. The latest installment in David Gatten’s internationally celebrated The Secret History of the Dividing Line series, How to Conduct a Love Affair takes its cue from an instruction manual, then revels in an elegant textual play harbouring a mystery of its own. The film’s measured pace and peaceful compositions are transformed by flashes of pure colour, hinting at love’s mystical and abiding powers.
Using Franz Kafka’s heart-rending letters to his beloved, Astrid Ofner’s ambitious Tell Me on Tuesday recounts the love affair between Kafka and Milena Jesenská. Written around their four-day liaison in Vienna, the correspondence frames a mythical encounter, the details of which remain unknown. Images of Vienna, captured on expired Super 8 stock, then transferred to 35mm, suggest the seductive ambiguity of the affair.
A visual succession – like breaths – of delicate, embroidered napkins and tablecloths imparts a lovely quietude in TZIPORAH, Abraham Ravett’s cinematic response to grief and loss. The programme concludes with a recently restored print of Encyclopaedia Britannica by the late British enfant terrible John Latham. A rapid flip-through of the eminent tome playfully challenges our notions of knowledge, which are too often wed to the written word.
Andréa Picard
Hannes Schüpbach is a Swiss-born filmmaker, painter, curator and writer whose films include Winter Fire (00), Portrait mariage (00), Spin (01), Toccata (02), Falten (05), Erzählung (07) and L’Atelier (08).
Charlotte Pryce is based in Los Angeles and teaches at the California Institute of the Arts. Her Films include X (88), Why (89), Concerning Flight: Five Illuminations in Miniature (04), Discoveries on the Forest Floor 1-3 (07) and The Parable of the Tulip Painter and the Fly (08).
David Gatten lives in Brooklyn. His films have screened in prestigious international forums and are included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Astrid Ofner was born in Linz. Her films include Savannah Bay (89), Into Emptiness (93), Now and for All Times (94) and Sag es mir Dienstag (07).