Oporto apresenta #30

"From the Age of Recklessness"

by Klaus Wyborny

16 mm film transfered to video, color, sound, 70', 1994

Oporto is finally presenting the  seventy-minute-long autobiographical film by Klaus Wyborny. In this film the film-maker, a former quantum physicist, talks about memory and traveling along with history and geometry, all seen from his adventurous past relationships. The film is an eternal flow of memories presented alongside a cocktail of extremely dry humor and melancholia. Wyborny approaches film as a scientific experiment in fiction and truth, and his goal is to capture (with a special camera device) the untenable flux of life in order to trigger the untenable flow of memories.

"Instructions on death avoidance and the eternal energy flow"

Alexandre Estrela

Saturday, March 23, 10.30pm 

For and Against the Eye, Saturday 10th November

Click here to see the entire program

Voyage to the Center of the Phone Lines, 04/10/2012

Oporto apresenta #29

"Voyage to the Center of the Phone Lines "

 by Michel Auder

 Analog video, color, sound, 53', 1993

Voyage to the Centre of the Phone Lines borrows its title from Jules Verne’s science-fiction novel Voyage au centre de la terre from 1864, in which a German professor explores volcanic tubes that lead him to the earth’s core and to an 1860s understanding of our planet’s geological development. ‘Voyage’ usually denotes faraway travel by sea, and Auder uses ‘holiday’ images of beaches, sunsets and verandas, already stamped with that vintage VHS look, to illustrate a sound track entirely consisting of excerpts from cordless and wireless telephone conversations between unnamed, unknown people. We all know eavesdropping is supposed to be bad, but even if we put up some resistance at first we cannot help being sucked into this maelstrom (another word that Jules Verne liked) of religious and financial speculation, parental despair, gleeful psychobabble and frank erotic revelation. Auder is usually right about what captures our attention and what constitutes unadulterated human interest.

"floating words in an echo world"    
Alexandre Estrela

Thursday, October 4, 10.30pm 

A Fire In My Belly, 28/04/2012

Oporto apresenta #28

"A Fire in My Belly"

by David Wojnarowicz

Film In progress, 1986-87. Super 8mm film transferred to video (black and white and color, silent) 

It’s quite common to see in experimental filmographies, footage migrating from project to project. David Wojnarowicz’s body of work is also haunted by footage that he constantly recycled from film to film, unveiling in each new montage a raw malaise."A Fire in my Belly" is an unfinished project, based on Mexican indigestible footage. The film is a violent stream of oppressive images, that Wojnarowicz exorcises, unleashing its dark energy. This silent film, presumably edited to the sound of Diamanda Galás, has been blasting the most sensitive and reactionary ears, leaving at its passage/screening a necessary open wound. 

David Wojnarowicz (1954.1992) was an activist, writer, an accomplished painter, performer, a transgressive filmmaker and above all a post-modern martyr.

“Shadows from a flaming tongue."
Alexandre Estrela
Saturday, April 28, 2012, 10 pm


Courtesy of The Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W Gallery, New York and The Fales Library,Special Collections/ New York University

Jornadas Cantianas, a 16 e 17 de Março

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Money, 21/01/2012

Oporto apresenta #27

"Money"

by Henry Hills

16mm film, color, sound (optical), 15', 1985

The mechanical specificities of film made it by far the most adequate medium to reveal cities’ inner rhythms. In the early 20th century, a film genre coined City Symphony vividly captured on celluloid the core of cities like Berlin, Paris, Odessa and Oporto. Pioneer filmmakers such as Ruttman, Sauvage, Vertov and Oliveira were able to translate and synthesize the urban struggle towards modernity, while channeling it towards a highly subjective mechanical ballet.

The film "Money", composed by the synesthetic genius Henry Hills, might be the last of the City Symphonies. The film is a concrete collage, a masterpiece that unveils New York City’s ultra fast inner currents, fueled by the lack of money and the creativity of its inhabitants. From the remainings of a city destroyed by financial crisis, Henry Hills builds up the ultimate mechanical view of his town.

“Rapid movements for the listening eye.”

Alexandre Estrela

Saturday, January 21, 2012, 11 pm

Bleu Shut, 18/11/2011

Oporto apresenta #26

"Bleu Shut"

by Robert Nelson

16mm film, color, sound, 33', 1970

Robert Nelson is a celebrated film-maker that turned down the glories of the avant-garde for the joys of backyard projectionism. His films are ironic constructions, open questions made for the pleasures of gathering. “Bleu Shut” fits right in the so-called tradition of participatory-film. The film is an experiment built around a guessing game, where the act of “seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees”. *

*title of book by Robert Irwin

“On the cognitive mechanisms of boat-naming and its effect on the uncertainties of the real.”

Alexandre Estrela

Friday, November 18, 2011, 10.30 pm

Phæton, 21/10/2011

Oporto apresenta #25

"Phæton"

by David Wharry

16mm film, b&w,sound, 7' 25, 1978

When a screen gets in contact with David Wharry`s films, it becomes a photosensitive membrane that, like an "Optogram" (an image imprinted on the retina), registers the surrounding action. The screen works, then, as a memory mechanism, a record of Wharry's actions, unveiling the inner-senses of his humorous cinematic charades.
It was in the late seventies that the author created "General Picture", a series of episodes built from the rubble of “noir” and mystery films. This body of work is a bright and mysterious plot on the foundations of the moving image. “Phæton” is one of the few episodes of "General Picture" which can be viewed independently. In this short film, Wharry makes us focus on the space between the retina and the eyelid to reveal the origin of the image and the birth of the otherness.

"Behind and beyond the eyelid"
Alexandre Estrela

Friday, October 21, 2011, 10.30 pm

with the presence of the author

Aleph, 22/06/2011

Oporto apresenta #24

"Aleph"

by Wallace Berman

16mm film, color,silent, loop, 1956-1966

Jorge Luis Borges describes the Aleph as a converging point of infinitude and simultaneous space, that he saw materialized on the 19th step of a staircase in an old building. In his description he mentions that this strange phenomenon can appear in other specific places.

Oporto is fortunate to have the perfect conditions to host once again an Aleph. It is a hidden staircase camouflaged by a fake desk, once used by the sailors to flee from PIDE (Portuguese fascist police). The present Aleph is a film by the visual artist and self-publication wizard, Wallace Berman; a poetic concentration of images portraying the artist's time, life, influences and work. Structured on the Kabbalah, "Aleph" is simultaneously a meditation on everyday life and a cryptic beat trip into infinite time and space.

" The narcotic to the flower"

Tosh Berman

Wednesday, June 22, 2011, 10.30 pm

You don't bring me flowers, 08/04/2011

Oporto apresenta #23

"You don't bring me flowers"
by Michael Robinson
16mm film, color, with optical sound, 8', 2005

Since the beginning of this millennium, Michael Robinson has been making film and video as trigger-objects for basic emotions. His work is a compilation of complex riddles, trails leading to ambiguous regions, places meant for the hard task of feeling. His narratives are deeply sensorial, warranting themselves difficult to translate into words.
Oporto is now presenting the film "You don't bring me flowers", a sublime diving experience into a succession of nostalgic images, centerfold pages from vintage National Geographic magazines.

"on deep image reading and other simmetry laws"

Alexandre Estrela


Friday, April 8, 2011, 10.30 pm

Dog Track, 16/01/2011

Oporto apresenta #22

"Dog Track"
by Phill Niblock
16mm film transfered to video, color, sound,8.5', 1969

If there is still someone with a nonconformist and experimental spirit in New York, that person is Phill Niblock. Since the sixties that the artist explores the power of sound and images to generate new frontiers and limits of perception. 
 Despite being a reference in the field of music, it was the film that led him to take the first steps in time-based-arts. Phill Niblock began by making structural experiments, short dance and sound films in collaboration with artists as diverse as Yvonne Rainer, Sun Ra and Max Neuhaus. After this period, Niblock starts to investigate the film medium itself by focusing on the inflow of movement in its various expressions. Working with a wide range of simple images, travel and ethnographic captures, landscapes or just abstract compositions, Niblock overlaps successive layers of sound, creating an open field, impervious to any definition.
Oporto presents "Dog Track ", a film that juxtaposes an inhuman sound, devoid of emotion, coming from a psychoanalytic interview, to images and landscapes of non-verbal beauty. "Dog Track" roughly exposes us, to an hypnotic report, a sad and monochordic chant produced by an impossible relationship. 
 

"The saddest song on earth" 
 Alexandre Estrela

Sunday, January 16, 2011, 10.30 pm

Whispering Pines, 07/12/2010

Oporto apresenta #21

"Whispering Pines"

by Shana Moulton
Video, color, sound,20', 2006-2008

For the last few years Shana Moulton has been creating a persona, named Cynthia, halfway between the mute Monsieur Hulot, from Jacques Tati's film "Play Time", and the hypochondriac Carol White, the suburban homemaker from Todd Haynes' "Safe". In Tatis' film, Hulot clumsily drifts in a modern world surrounded by modern incomprehensible stuff. Cynthia is also surrounded by a puzzling set of postmodern home kitsch and TV-Shop paraphernalia, to which she connects emotionally barely knowing their use. As Carol, Cynthia seeks, for a safe place, an escape for a healing dimension, a transcendental gateway that she finds hidden it in each object.

Oporto is now presenting from the series "Whispering Pines" some key chapters of Cynthia's domestic "walkabout".

"Notes on the untenable lightness of things"
Alexandre Estrela

Tuesday, December 07, 2010, 11 pm

Daylight Moon, 16/07/2010

Oporto apresenta #20

"Daylight Moon"
by Lewis Klahr
16mm film, color, sound (Optical), 14 ', 2003

Lewis Klahr is the long waited follower of Max Ernst and Joseph Cornell´s surrealist legacy. His films are unique cinematic-collages, uncanny streams of scenarios where subjects and things try (and fail) to fall into an order.
Daylight Moon is an elliptical narrative, a detective story told in images and shadows from old Americana comics and ads. The film reveals a subtle unconscious quest for the unnamed pleasure or crime.

"a melancholic longing for an irrecoverable past" Alexandre Estrela

Friday, July 16, 2010, 11 pm

Clearchannel Mountain Range Frontier Expansion Tracking Shot So Far, Oporto 22/05/2010