Visual Essays: Origins of Film

2 or 3 Things I Know About Her

March 1967 •French

As the city of Paris and the French people grow in consumer culture, a housewife living in a high-rise apartment with her husband and two children takes to prostitution to help pay the bills.

Visions of Europe

May 2004 •English

Twenty-five films from twenty-five European countries by twenty-five European directors.

A lo Mejor Algún Día

Invalid date •Spanish

Donosti 2730

March 2024 •Spanish

A youngster writes a letter to his grandmother about his last trip to Donosti (Spain). This city inspires him to ponder about the language of cinema, time, cities, and sharing memories with our loved ones.

Exergo

May 2024 •Basque

Departing from peripheral details of some paintings of the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, a female narrator unravels several stories related to the economic, social and psychological conditions of past and current artists.

Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons

January 1974 •English

Penthesilea, the first of six films made by Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, traverses thousands of years to look at the image of the Amazonian woman in myth. It asks, among other questions, is the Amazonian woman a rare strong female image or is she a figure derived from male phantasy? The film explores the complexities of such questions, but does not seek any concrete answers.

Bruja

June 2019 •German

A story of diaspora. The film criticises the myth of Swiss neutrality, which violently masks structural, systemic, and social passivity.

And the Dogs Were Silent

April 1976 •French

For 'Et les chiens se taisaient' Maldoror adapted a piece of theatre by the poet and politician Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), about a rebel who becomes profoundly aware of his otherness when condemned to death. His existential dialogue with his mother reverberates around the African sculptures on display at the Musée de l'Homme, a Parisian museum full of colonial plunder whose director was the Surrealist anthropologist Michel Leiris.

Dr Tscharniblues

June 1979 •German

Bern, 1979: a tower block called Tscharnergut. A group of friends get together to make a film about their experiences growing up in suburban Switzerland.

Oxymoron Life...

October 2024 •Portuguese

The wanderer Rascal embarks on a psychotic and contradictory journey to break out of the ego bubble in which his self-loathing and isolation have inserted him in. After his metamorphosis, his soulmate, Paloma, makes him realize that life is as complicated as it is simple - and that all that's left to do is to live.

SONHO QUE VIVIA ACORDADO

October 2025 •Portuguese

The Truth About the Imaginary Passion of an Unknown

May 1974 •French

A very personal interpretation, to say the least, of the passion of the Christ According to St. John.

Remastered Brutality

October 2024 •Turkish

Alinur, a student filmmaker, tries to make a film about the apocalypse for his capstone project. The movie itself happens to be about a mercenary named M who inadvertently causes an apocalypse. As he tries to “create” the destruction of this supposed apocalypse through utilizing technical gimmicks that he has enforced onto the production of the film, this supposed effort also creeps in as a force that starts to “destroy” him, piece by piece. The outcome of it tests the sincerity of not only the film itself but also of the performative efforts that Alinur has made as a filmmaker—even this test might not be as sincere as it seems.

Une vie pour deux

October 2013 •French

Freely adapted from the eponymous novel, Une vie pour deux is inspired by real events, the discovery by the novelist's husband (director Jean-Pierre Ronfard) of the corpse of a young woman on a beach in Ireland in the late 1970s.

I don't want to have to be loud

March 2024 •German

She is defined; from birth on. The role she has to play, who she is and what she is made of is not determined by her. If one’s own body and gender are a political issue, it is about time that one’s own voice is heard.

Frankenstein (Re)Membered

November 2018 •English

Since its publication 200 years ago, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has influenced vast swathes of popular culture. Adaptations have starred cinema legends from Boris Karloff to Robert De Niro – and even Alvin and the Chipmunks. From tales of science gone mad (Jurassic Park) to stories of understanding the other (ET, The Hulk, Arrival), traces of the story and its themes have spread across our media. With Frankenstein Re-membered, video artist and film historian Chris Gerrard collects these diverse fragments from the birth of cinema until the present day and in the tradition of Victor Frankenstein himself, attempts to stitch them back together into an adaptation of the original Shelley novel.

Hands Up!

January 1985 •Polish

The reunion of a group of former medical students results in a flood of bitter memories.

Beyond Tragedies

March 2022 •Portuguese

Recalling his childhood and relationship with his mother, a film student tries to understand the origin of his love for cinema and tragedies.

Dual

Invalid date •Spanish

After receiving a phone call, a man feels his inner world come to a standstill. Recalling the event decades later, he relives how everything changed in that moment and reflects on how quickly his life has passed and how his reality was constructed by all the things he repeated to himself like a mantra.

Nourishment of the oblivion

June 2022 •English

Andrea and the simbionte travel to Toledo; when they arrive, they find a lonely bus station, which slowly turns off the lights for them. In the silence that surrounds them, Andrea watches the moment pass and with it her certainty about her future dream with the simbionte, feeling that everything she experiences is actually a memory.