Untitled (Trust)

There is more than one kind of silence in this programme. The screaming silence of James Richards’s digital remake of Tony Conrad’s seminal flicker film, overlaid with the English subtitles of Marguerite Duras’s Les mains négatives (1979) — an evocation of absence and presence, an endless cry for love. There is the silent testimony of a community of nuns at the Carmelite convent Heilig Blut [Precious Blood], founded in 1964, located next to the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial. The proximity to a location so steeped in history, where almost two hundred thousand people experienced incomprehensible suffering, was an intentional choice by the Carmelite nuns. Büttner seeks a dialogue with them. The film bears witness to two modes of silence—one of contemplation and one of complicity. The concentrated silence on the screen in Friedl vom Gröller’s eponymous portrait of a painted portrait of an unnamed woman stares back at the audience for one and a half minutes. Through acts of appropriation, the redirection of gazes, and the nuanced navigation of cinematic means, these works engage in a delicate and profound exercise in trust, inviting the viewer to confront silence as an action performed, rather than a passive condition.

“Every void (not accepted) produces hatred, sourness, bitterness, spite. The evil we wish for that which we hate, and which we imagine, restores the balance. […] The imagination, filler up of the void, is essentially a liar. It does away with the third dimension, for only real objects have three dimensions. It does away with multiple relationships.” (Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, 1947)

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A programme curated for shhh festival by Monokino in Ostend, Belgium. Shhh is the only festival that declares its love for silent film and the sea. The sixth edition is centered around The Social Life of Film, an international gathering of nomadic film platforms from different corners of the world.

The first edition of The Social Life of Film was organised last year in Copenhagen by PRISMS and Terrassen. This year, Monokino is bringing the meeting to Ostend.

With the particpation of anorak (Berlin), Beforeforgetting (Copenhagen), Birdie Num Num (Barcelona), blue screen (Brussels), Cinema Fulgor (Odemira), Cinema Galleggiante (Venice), Cinéma_Parenthèse (Brussel), HÆRK (Oslo), Kinoautomat (Ghent), LaborBerlin (Berlin), Liberated Film_Club (London), Lumière (Sevilla), Mascara Film Club (London), Monokino (Oostende), Nomadica (Bologna), Non-Aligned Film Archives (Paris/Rennes), Other Cinemas (London), Polar Film Lab (Tromsø), PRISMS (Oslo), Sharna Pax (Copenhagen/London), Sinema Transtopia (Berlin), Terrassen (Copenhagen), The Camelia Committee (Beirut/Oslo), Walden (Stockholm), WET (Rotterdam).