Who’s Afraid of Film?
Workshop by Mercedes Álvarez
A workshop/encounter revolving around the essential question throughout the history of film: “The view”. The history of film is the history of the learning of a view.
Ever since the Lumière brothers’ films, with the arrival of the train that for the first time crossed an invisible line between imagination and reality, with all the possibilities open to the view, to the imagination, the question has remained the same: how much space does one leave to the audience’s view, to their imagination, their emotions? This whole margin of freedom that needs to be reconquered is now in the grip of a deluge of images that neither remain nor leave any trace in our memory.
As Godard said, film is always a doubt and never a certainty. Through this doubt, we have learned to look through the film-maker’s camera; women and men at different times in history, in different cinematographies, have been the film-makers who have broadened, questioned and transformed our view of the world.
Today, as always in film, it is a matter of preparing the view to be free before the images; images that do not aim to sell us anything, images that seek a re-encounter, to share the wonder and leave film free to say all the things that cannot be said in any other way. Only in film.
As Dulac, one of the pioneering women directors in the history of film said, talking about the impact of cinematographic images on her origins, “Nobody was ready for this.” Rediscovering this wonder and continuing to weave the thread of images, leaving the space to the most basic right of all, shared by film-makers and spectators alike: the right to their view.
Today, perhaps more than ever, it is important to reflect on one’s view in films, and how to use film to restore this view, freed from the din of images, in a world invaded by constant, ever-changing volleys of images through social networks, the internet, the mass media, artificial intelligence, images that stay in the digital cloud but leave no trace in either the individual or the collective memory.
