Lav Diaz

This  paper  deals  with  the  ontogenesis  of  time  in  Lav  Diaz’s  post-Batang  West Side  cinema.  By  collaborating  with  the  ideas  of  Gilles  Deleuze,  Felix  Guattari,  Vilem Flusser  and  Jacques  Derrida,  the  paper  philosophically  grapples  with  the  nonphilosophy  of  Diaz’s  cinema.  The  text  proposes  a  transversal  constitution  of  time  by insisting that, in any event, whether cinematic, conceptual or natural, time is constituted
in  the  paradoxical  space  between  arborescence  (time-consciousness)  and  immanence (becoming). The paper also highlights on the complicity of representational politics with
the  politics  of  time  and  insists  on  the  deconstructive  non-structure  of  the  ‘authorfunction’  when  infolded  within  the  multiplanar  constitutions  of  time.  The  text  also actively resolves the contradiction between two concepts of ‘contemplation’ constituted by Thomas Elsaesser and Gilles Deleuze in their respective texts and proposes open time
-  a  singularity  between  time  and  Deleuzo-Guattarian  idea  of  the  rhizome  -  as  a conceptual alternative to contemplative time  inscribed by ‘slow cinema’ discourse. The concept of the  open image  (its components, its political and ethical dimensions)  is  also introduced in the text.

The dissertation explores the works of the Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz, the idea of the Anthropocene, and sets up a conceptual dialogue between the two.With his films often extending upto 11 hours, Lav Diaz has by now achieved global notoriety as a purveyor of slow cinema, portraying a listless Filipino countryside in the aftermath of the Marcos’ dictatorship. In this, Diaz follows the tenets of contemporary slow cinema that, apart from their emphasis on observation and duration, also display a newfound awareness of the natural world, and a fascination with rural lifestyles and untouched environments. And yet, as the Anthropocene argues, untouched environments are a passé, lost to man’s radical intervention, and or entanglement with natural systems.The Anthropocene also arrives with its own apocalyptic fantasies; its own version of ‘becoming waste’ across planetary scales. It pronounces a representational quandary forcing us to not only imagine a temporal and spatial existence of the planet beyond our limited experiences of it, but scalar entanglements that do not neatly cocoon into each other. It is here that Anthropocenic discourses connect up to Diaz’s films in that his works speak to multiple scales of existence, from the microbial to the planetary, the phenomenological and the political at once. Furthermore, Diaz’s films with their entanglement of natural and human histories also prove a potent point of entry into the Anthropocene; forcing us to imagine not a sublime landscape out there, but one lived, experienced and encountered materially and affectively, transformative in the wake of epochal political transformations. It is here that anti-colonial revolutions meet pagan-animistic cultures, shamans with military personnel, and activist poets thrown into a post-apocalyptic, post-civilizational landscape.The forest becomes a crucial space that this thesis traverses, a dense, vexing landscape that allows one to closely introspect an entanglement with different species, enter into a world where objects, vegetal, animal or mineral, begin to speak alike.
Born into the digital era, and into an information-seeking realm of geological-natural sciences, the Anthropocene has been viewed primarily as a [hard] ‘technological condition’, the phenomenon that opens up the unsaid relation between the physical and the social sciences.This dissertation, therefore, seeks to redeem the Anthropocene from an extremely hard-scientistic, media-technological imagination to delineate how Diaz critiques it, imagining a rhetoric of the apocalyptic universal that is contextual, historical, cultural, and ecological, while exceeding the domains of the human.

Fontaínhas as site (locus, tropoi) of subaltern existence (Spivak), and tropic of privileged places in visual rhetoric. Agamben’s highly debatable concept of "Muselmann". Pedro Costa, Lav Diaz, Apichatpong's films about mourning, the ghost figures of the painter István Farkas who died in Auschwitz, in the light of the anticipated, pre-arranged mourning, and the essay of Imre Kertész about István Farkas --- thoughts about the ghosts and mourning in the context of the pandemic. Foreword of the Farkas/Kertész Reader. / Az Enigma most megjelenő, két kötetes, Farkas Istvánnal és Kertész Imrével foglalkozó számának bevezetője.  Kapható az Írók Boltjában.

Kevin Jerome Everson (b. 1965) is arguably one of the most important audio-visual artists/filmmakers working in the U.S. now. Having gained a global recognition through various retrospectives (Viennale, 2014; Visions du Reel, Nyon, 2012; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2011; and Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2009), his work has been featured at the 2008, 2012 and 2017 Whitney Biennials and the 2013 Sharjah Biennial. His huge filmography of over 140 works constitutes a peculiar monument to the past and present of African Americans, in ways that defy conventional expectations.

Written and published in the wake of the first retrospective devoted to his fascinating oeuvre (as well as another significant experimental filmmaker David Gatten's) in MMCA, Seoul, Korea (1.28-2.26.2017, https://www.mmca.go.kr/eng/exhibitions/exhibitionsDetailExh.do?exhId=201701130000521), my essay explores his works in terms of the way they render manifest otherwise invisible 'techniques' (distinct from 'technology') and 'time' (often literally compressed in nondescript inert materials), along with the political ramifications of various 'gestures' in view of 'Black Lives Matter' movement. Referencing, if indirectly, notable contemporary filmmakers
such Harun Farocki, Lav Diaz, John Torres, and Khavn de la Cruz, Everson imperceptibly yet decisively revises and expands their ongoing legacy. This article ends by decrypting his curious yet enigmatic suggestion that he does "not need spectators" to show how it supplements his brilliant "sculpting" of everyday gestures and craftsmanship by African Americans.

Il cinema è ancora qualcos’altro rispetto al suo dispositivo? Se il cinema nel nuovo millennio è sempre più pensato, prodotto, fruito e studiato come medium digitalizzato, softwarizzato, deistituzionalizzato e tendenzialmente musealizzato, come rintracciare ancora un’identità riconoscibile? Dalla recente produzione hollywoodiana alle selezioni sempre più sperimentali dei festival internazionali – le analisi qui proposte spazieranno dai blockbuster americani alle nuove onde sudamericane, cinesi, filippine – si tenterà di riportare al centro della riflessione il film sia nella sua singolarità testuale sia nelle sue interrelazioni con ogni audiovisivo di confine. Domandandosi se il cinema contemporaneo possa ancora essere in grado di produrre teoria, di riflettere su se stesso e sul proprio posto nel mondo, quindi di riflettere sulla nostra mutata soggettività e sui sempre differenti regimi di sguardo filtrati dalla tecnica. E rivendicando così, indirettamente, anche una “rinnovata” identità nel complesso panorama mediale odierno.
    Con analisi di film come: Il grande e potente Oz, Jurassic World, The Visit, Nemico pubblico, Sils Maria, Adieu au langage, Holy Motors, Jauja, A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery, I Wish I Knew, ecc.

This paper explores the relationship of Andre Bazin's ontological assertions of photographic reality of film with Lav Diaz's long take aesthetics. The paper briefly glosses over three opening scenes of Lav Diaz namely  in Heremias (Book One:  The Legend of the Lizard Princess)  (2005),  Death  in  the  Land  of  Encantos  (2007)  and  Florentina Hubaldo,  CTE  (2013) as exemplifications of the relation between Bazin and Diaz.

In summer 2012, I sat in the Edinburgh Filmhouse and waited for the screening of Florentina Hubaldo, CTE, the new film by Lav Diaz, writer--director from the Philippines, now perhaps best known for his latest film Norte The End of History, which screened at last year's Cannes festival. In fan circles and for somewhat hardcore cinephiles, he is most famous for his lengthy metaphorical treatments of Philippine history and the country's social malaise: Melancholia, eight hours; Death in the Land of Encantos, nine hours; and Evolution of a Filipino Family, ten hours. And this is the average. He is, in fact, working on a film that has a running-time of fifty hours at the moment. In any case, I knew Lav's eight--hour film Melancholia from a screening in Newcastle. Sitting in a comfy seat, I felt prepared with food and drinks to my feet. What I wasn't prepared for was the new kind of power he has infused his new film with, a power he transmitted by a unique choice of aesthetics, which he has never used before. After a six--hour traumatic ordeal, for both the viewer and the main character, the film ends with a young woman, Florentina, sitting in a chair, her nose bleeding and her left cheek swollen. She experiences difficulties to retain her posture while keeping a cool cloth to her head. Looking directly at the viewer, she mutters: "My head hurts. My head never stops hurting. It never stops." [still] Florentina repeats herself over and over again. She speaks about having been beaten by her father, about having been chained to her bed, strangled, and about having been sold to men. After a twenty--minute static long--take, the young Florentina loses her strength and her consciousness. Florentina Hubaldo is a metaphorical treatment of chronic trauma as a result of 300 years of colonialism. Rather than transmitting the theme of trauma through aesthetics such as

Ce texte propose une analyse de 'A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mysteries' (Lav Diaz, 2016), depuis la perspective de ses modalités spectatorielles et appuyée sur la défense bazinienne de « l’impureté cinématographique ». Plutôt qu’enfermer son œuvre dans la boucle tautologique
d’une marginalité subie, nous proposons une vision de l’œuvre du cinéaste philippin comme incarnation d’une marginalité propre au cinéma contemporain, où la place du spectateur est mobile, objet d’invention et de réinvention.

Este artigo reflete sobre as estratégias para a análise fílmica a partir do
enfrentamento com dois filmes de duração superior a 400 minutos: As mil e uma noites (2015), de Miguel Gomes, e Canção para um triste mistério (2016), de Lav Diaz. Filmes de longa duração podem deixar o analista que se propõe a estudá-los em uma posição incômoda, frente a uma série de
problemas. Como encontrar tempo para ver, rever, localizar fotogramas, citar, comparar um filme com os anteriores? Como traduzir, pela descrição textual acompanhada da reprodução de alguns fotogramas, a experiência da duração? Mesmo quando é possível exibir um trecho em um colóquio ou incluí-lo no texto, os efeitos de repetição e acumulação que as imagens adquirem ao longo do visionamento completo esvaem-se, atualizando o paradoxo descrito por Bellour (1979). Como o analista pode estudar um e outro filmes?

A longa duração – de planos e filmes –, ao lado de uma sensação difusa de lentidão, vem sendo apontada pela crítica e pela academia como tendência do cinema independente contemporâneo, relacionada ao uso dos suportes digitais de gravação e exibição. Tal característica pode de modo geral ser encontrada em toda a obra do cineasta filipino Lav Diaz. Neste artigo, a questão será pensada sobretudo no estudo de dois de seus filmes, Florentina Hubaldo, CTE (2012) e A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery (2016), em primeiro lugar como dificuldade para a análise fílmica, exacerbando o paradoxo descrito por Raymond Bellour em “Le texte introuvable” (1979), e em seguida em meio às interrogações sobre a atualidade da sala de cinema. Para além da discussão à realidade e ao realismo do cinema a partir da ontologia proposta por Bazin (1993), aqui a questão do plano longo será abordada sobretudo do ponto de vista da postura espectatorial, tanto com relação a sua atenção – como os filmes de Diaz direcionam (ou abstêm-se de direcionar) a atenção do espectador? – quanto da experiência comunitária das salas de cinema.

Krótka recenzja filmu „Kołysanka do bolesnej tajemnicy” (reż. Lav Diaz, 2016); tekst opublikowany w Gazecie Festiwalowej „Na Horyzoncie”: http://cojestgrane24.wyborcza.pl/cjg24/1,338,20466455,0,-bdquo-Kolysanka-do-bolesnej-tajemnicy-rdquo---mgl.html

Nous avons rencontré pour la première fois Lav Diaz à Tokyo en octobre 2013, puis un mois plus tard à Manille pour un premier entretien. Rencontre rocambolesque, prévue un matin de novembre 2013, et qui eut lieu…tard le soir. Simplement, il nous avait fallu la journée entière pour traverser la ville balayée par le typhon Yolanda ! Deux ans plus tard, fin 2015, sortaient presque conjointement en France Death in the land of encantos (2007) et Norte (2013). Et le Jeu de Paume consacrait une magnifique rétrospective (orchestrée par Antoine Thirion) au cinéaste philippin. À l'exception de quelques cinéphiles français qui avaient découvert Evolution of a Filipino Family au Cinéma du Réel en 2007, la plupart découvrait alors cette oeuvre immense. Ce fut l'occasion du présent entretien.

La « tragédie musicale » du réalisateur philippin, Lav Diaz Entretien avec le réalisateur à propos de La saison du diable

https://esprit.presse.fr/actualites/clement-dumas-et-elise-domenach/la-saison-du-diable-une-tragedie-musicale-entretien-avec-lav-diaz-41656

Dans le cadre de la pensée sur la longue durée et la lenteur dans le cinéma contemporain, ce texte offre une analyse de Florentina Hubaldo, CTE (2012), film de six heures réalisé par le cinéaste philippin Lav Diaz. Nous nous concentrerons sur quelques-uns de ses plans longs et très longs pour dessiner une articulation entre leur durée étendue, et la visibilité conférée à des êtres infimes et marginaux, associés de manière allégorique à l’histoire nationale.

Iniziamo con A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery (2016). Il cinema di Lav Diaz, del resto, ci appare da sempre come una paradossale ninnananna sul mistero doloroso: da un lato i traumi dolenti della storia filippina colti sempre tra colonialismo e dittature, ingiustizie e morti violente, menzogne e oblio della memoria; da un altro lato il re-incanto dell'immagine cinematografica che si prenda in carico la riemersione di una memoria rubata e la creazione di un immaginario popolare finalmente dal basso.

Com tempos mortos, planos longos, quadros abertos e roteiro vago,
"Beduíno", de Júlio Bressane, e "Na Vertical", de Alain Guiraudie, vão na contramão da aceleração da montagem e da eficiência narrativa de produções comerciais. Sua proposta estética incomum parece feita para ser vista somente nas salas de cinema.