MARTIROSYAN / BUCHER / FAROCKI: REFRAMING HISTORY

SCREENING - ÉCRAN D'ART

Nora Martirosyan, 1937, 2007, 44’08”, video, colour, Armenian with English subtitles
François Bucher, Forever Live: The Case of K. Gun, 2006, 17’51”, video, colour, English
Harun Farocki, Respite, 2007, 40’, video, b/w, English

These three recent works reframe and redefine history. They re-interpret images and testimonies going back to three ideological spaces: Stalinism, late capitalism and fascism. 1937 investigates the parallels between the history of a nation and an individual story within that country’s history. 1937 was the year of the Stalinist purges in Yerevan, a city in what was then Soviet Armenia. Nora Martirosyan provides a fictional report of a political arrest. In the 1930s, the filmmaker’s grandmother was a young girl. Sixty-nine years later, she tells her own personal story about the arrest. With the aid of an allegorical text by Franz Kafka, in Forever Live: The Case of K. Gun, François Bucher takes a metaphoric look at a true event that took place before the second UN resolution on the invasion of Iraq: a security leak by a translator.  In the silent essay film, Respite, historic footage of the Nazi transit camp at Westerbork, the Netherlands, form the basis for Farocki’s sampling of visual archeology.


The Ecran d’Art series is a monthly screening of artists’ film and/or video jointly organised by argos and Cinema Arenberg, in collaboration with La Cambre Academy.

Nora Martirosyan, 1937, 2007François Bucher, Forever Live: The case of K. Gun, 2006