In focus
Section composed of three programmes. One about the most restless and innovative paths of documentary exploration, related to the Sensory Ethnography Lab —“Amidst the Flies”—, one about the artistic re-editing of the chaotic internet archive —“Permanence of the Ephemeral”—, and one based on the work of Alia Syed, a Welsh filmmaker of Indian origin.
The program “Permanence of the Ephemeral” will travel in the coming months to La Filmoteca Valenciana, Cineteca Madrid, and Filmoteca de Galicia. Additionally, in its next edition, the Márgenes Festival will continue to explore the work of the Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) through a complementary program organized in collaboration with the Reina Sofía Museum.
Amidst the Flies
What if reality were only really reflected as it is to the eyes of a fly? That seemed to be the implicit proposition behind the most famous metaphor of direct cinema — the fly on the wall. In the late 1950s, when the foundations of this cinematic movement were laid, the possibility of bringing cinema into everyday life opened a new frontier for realism. Portable cameras and the smaller crew needed on a film set allowed fiction to be sustained in such a way that filmmakers went completely unnoticed and could cultivate a gaze as detached from the facts as that of a fly on the wall. Although they flirted with that metaphor, the pioneers of direct cinema did not like being referred to as flies on the wall. Making their films required an emotional connection that was inconceivable for the apathetic gaze of a fly.
Permanence of the ephemeral
Today, humanity portrays itself and records the world around it every day. It produces an audiovisual record of society and everyday life so immense that its boundaries are ungraspable. It is a digital record, uneven, amorphous and extremely chaotic, where the banal and the significant constantly intersect. Where standardised formats do not prevent a multitude of unforeseen expressions from emerging. It is a rapid, volatile inscription, ephemeral and raw, often unaware of being a record.
Alia Syed
Since the 1980s, Alia Syed has been making films that draw from personal and historical realities in order to address the subjective relationship to gender, location, diaspora and colonialism. Her work resists the linearity of the film strip and of traditional narrative structures, using layering and repetition — enfolding fact, fiction, present and past.
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