Video essay

VIDEO ESSAY

Florencia Aliberti, Caterina Cuadros Sbert y Gala Hernández

MODIFY

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Ensayo en vídeo from Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema on Vimeo.

In the 1960s the emergence of super 8 and 16 mm cameras meant a turning point for visual practices and a key moment for the appearance of new genres/formats, like the diary or the so-called home movies. The accessibility opportunities those new technologies offered produced a shift in the production processes of film industry: from big studios to home, from epical stories to daily situations, from narrative time to experiential time. In this new context, placed in the margins of film production, many women decided to take the cameras and turn them into themselves.

This essay offers a path across some works that approach the theme of the self-represented body, as well as the new ways women have developed from the self-portrait genre to (re)write themselves in the screen. The essay moves through different emotional states and spaces, by recovering images of female filmmakers that seek to get rid of the masculine, dominating gaze over female body through a self-representation gesture. In its images the body looks itself as an inscription surface to reflect on the relations and conflicts with nearby spaces, by stopping on daily actions and exploring topics such as intimacy, sexuality, masturbation or maternity. This re-exploration of the female subject motivates a new spatio-temporal understanding of image, where the shot length, the waits, the idle times or the daily, intimate situations symbolize a break with the representation modes of such an extremely masculinized device that cinema was (and still is).

FLORENCIA ALBERTI

Florencia Aliberti studied Filmmaking in Buenos Aires, graduated in Philosophy (Universitat de Barcelona) and is currently studying the MA in Contemporary Film and Audiovisual Studies in Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Her main field of interest is film editing, and she works largely in documentary and experimental film and video. Her work moves between the screening room and the exhibition spaces. Her last appropriation pieces have been focused in the new ways of self-representation and privacy in the Internet. She has presented her work in many festivals and exhibitions, such as IDFA, London Film Festival, Hamburg Short Film Festival, BAFICI, Xcèntric Cinema, Pantalla CCCB, Genealogías Feministas del Arte Español, Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Flux Festival (Centre d’Art Santa Mònica), FLEX Florida Experimental Film Festival, among others.

CATERINA CUADROS SBERT

CaterinaCaterina Cuadros Sbert graduated in Design in EINA (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) and is currently studying the MA in Contemporary Film and Audiovisual Studies in Universitat Pompeu Fabra. She has collaborated with the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, where some of her works currently are, and has designed pieces for the Art Rotterdam Week. At the same time, she has done research on the relations between education and neoliberalism and has proposed alternative modes of teaching. This project involved some publications that can be found in the Macba archive. She has also contributed to the magazine Quadern de les idees, les arts i les lletres, and has taught practical workshops in the ESDi (Escola Superior de Disseny, Universitat Ramon Llull). Regarding her works on cinema, she is carrying out a research project on the memory within the performer’s body, as well as the confrontations with the personal past and the revelations of the limit time this process entails.

GALA HERNÁNDEZ

Gala Hernández studied Cinema and Audiovisual Media with a specialisation in Filmmaking in ESCAC (Escola Superior de Cinema i Audiovisuals de Catalunya - Universitat de Barcelona), where she obtained her degree with Naturaleza muerta, a 35mm short film which is new starting to be shown in festivals. She is currently finishing the MA in Contemporary Film and Audiovisual Studies (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), where she carries out a research on figuration and metaphysics of the desert landscape in cinema; she will finish this project in Paris as a student of IMACS (International Master in Audiovisual and Cinema Studies). Meanwhile, she works as a video editor in PlayGround Magazine. She is also finishing her first book of poems, which will be published as a plaquette in October 2016 by adminimum. Her poems have appeared in digital spaces such as El Coloquio de los Perros y digopalabra.txt, and she has directed some music videos.