Frieze. Nov - Dec 07.

The praise these films have received is well-deserved, because their achievements constitute a striking example of a Modernist form of "national cinema": their approach to examining Romania's recent history encompasses the entire experience of European auteur cinema since Roberto Rossellini started filming in Rome in the early 40s. Narrative cinema (like any other art, but more so because of its potential to "write history" in its own way) has a threefold task in "liberated" or "revolutionary" societies: to remember and reconstruct the time before the change, because the overthrown regimes have usually been audio-visually restrictive; to remember and re-evaluate the "revolutionary" events themselves; and to chronicle the aftermath (the new era) and measure it against what preceded it. Now, 18 years after the revolution, Romanian filmmakers assume these tasks with a confidence and a variety of formal strategies that is all the more astounding for the fact that, with the exception of the work of director Lucian Pintilie (The Afternoon of a Torturer, 2001, for instance), there is really no tradition of this kind of filmmaking in Romania.

Also in the new issue of frieze:

"Oh, and this morning I saw another amazing film," writes James Benning:

I was at my school, which has been rented out to a high school summer arts programme. The halls were filled with teenagers. Off to the side in one of the main galleries a young man was playing Erik Satie's Vexations (1893), a piano piece with 840 repetitions that is composed to go on for ever. I went in and listened for a few hours. What a treat and surprise to hear this being performed. Occasionally a few students would come in, most of the time for less than a minute, and then wander off. Two young girls stood in the doorway for 30 minutes, mystified and perhaps a bit afraid to enter the genius of this work. They reminded me of myself, the first time I saw and heard John Cage. Then a blind student came in and sat down. He carried a red and white cane that folded into itself. He listened intently and was still there when I left. Imagine what he saw.

Claire Gilman on Corey McCorkle: "Film is a growing component of McCorkle's production, not least because of its presumed transparency."

Dominic Eichler on Haris Epaminonda: "In the last few years, the artist has produced a series of radiant, emotional, audio-visual vignettes, which are long enough to soak into the viewer's consciousness yet short enough to assume the qualities of a vision: they come and go fleetingly, but linger in the head like an afterimage. Reality is kept at arm's length, its absence not particularly noticed, while the present is lost in a fictionalized past."

Catrin Lorch: "In front of [Bojan] Šarčević's two new films, one can submit to nostalgia for the magic of celluloid: this is what it might have looked like, back when cinecameras were still blithely pointed at goodness and beauty in any form; an earlier age, before the links between sculpture and electronic image had been subjected to art-historical fine-tuning."

Nicola Harvey on "the rudimentary domestic bliss of [Guy] Ben-Ner's video work Stealing Beauty (2007)."

"The glow of 65 televisions outlines the nave of a deconsecrated church, the sound from each jostling in the musty air." Chris Fite-Wassilak on Andrew Kötting.

"The British artist Lucy Skaer works between these two poles of mystery and decipherment with a practice that includes drawing, sculpture, film and a number of collaborations." A monograph by Melissa Gronlund.

Amanda Coulson on new work by Bjørn Melhus: "Known for his adept procedure of using snippets of dialogue from television and film - himself lip-synching to the often-recognizable sound bites - to create video works that are comic yet socially pertinent, visitors expecting more of the same will not be disappointed."

Christy Lange contextualizes Nedko Solakov's Quixotic attempts to use a camera "to resolve the heated ten-year dispute between Russia and his native country, Bulgaria, over who owns the right to produce one of the world's most popular automatic weapons, the Kalashnikov rifle."

"It is hard to convey the uncanny effect of American English slowly and, it seems, irrevocably becoming the first language at Berlin openings," writes Tirdad Zolghadr.

Posted by dwhudson at October 25, 2007 10:12 AM