Back and Forth: Dialogues with Painting and Film

Chris Marker follows Roberto Matta. Alain Resnais ponders Guernica. Philippe Garrel searches with Frédéric Pardo. Niki de Saint Phalle spins a fairy tale. Anthony Ramos takes his practice abroad. For two days, painters and filmmakers in France and America will volley back and forth ideas and experimental forms across the canvas and the screen. Films to include Marker’s Matta ’85 and Garrel’s Le Berceau de cristal.

Back and Forth: Dialogues with Painting and Film is organized by Jake Perlin, L’Alliance New York’s Film Programmer.

All films in original version with English subtitles, unless when noted.

 

Program 1— Nov 22, 7:30pm

EX
Dir. Jacques Monory, 4 min, 1968, DCP 

The Crystal Cradle, Le Berceau de cristal
Dir. Philippe Garrel, 81 min, 1976, 35mm

The ghosts of May ’68 float over these films, conjured by two of the most extraordinary painters of that generation. Blue-hued—like much of his work—Monory’s rapid-fire montage of found footage of car crashes and political rallies, intercut with socializing youth and a lone man running the streets through oblivious pedestrians, seems to be a four-minute distillation of the energy that leads to the barricades. Garrel’s lush color film, set to the music of Ash Ra Temple, considers a blissful post-’68 paradise, populated by his friends and lovers, centered around static takes of Zanzibar Group comrade Frédéric Pardo’s paintings, namely Le Tigre. 
 
“Snapshot of a discordant generation. The cradle? Art (Pardo’s painting, Nico’s poetry, the Langlois Museum). The crystal? The cold (Anita Pallenberg’s powder, the silence before suicide). Every life is a demolition process.” – Philippe Azoury

 

Program 2— Nov 23, 2pm

Guernica
Dir. Alain Resnais, Robert Hessens, 13 min, 1950, DCP

Discovery in a Painting
Dir. Leo Hurwitz, Manfred Kirchheimer, 30 min, 1968/2014, DCP

Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Delights, Le Jardin des délices de Jérôme Bosch
Dir. Jean Eustache, 34 min, 1981, DCP

Three ways of looking at paintings. Resnais and Hessens present Picasso’s monumental Guernica as a political document, its enormous canvas a polemic on a Spanish Civil War massacre. Eustace turns his camera on Jean-Noêl Picq, who guides us through Bosch’s phantasmagory. An illustrated lecture, personal and idiosyncratic, like a tipsy night at home surrounded by friends. Hurwitz and Kirchheimer take us into, and closer than we could with our own eye, Cézanne’s Still Life with Apple, stroke by stroke, corner by corner. Filmed in 1970 at the Museum of Modern Art but unfinished, Kirchheimer returned to the footage in 2016, and in his typically masterful way, added the sounds of the gallery, creating a thirty minute rumination, alone with the work, but surrounded by others. 

 

Program 3— Nov 23, 4pm

Alice Neel Paints Margaret
Dir. Michel Auder, 31 min, 1978/2009, Reel to reel video

Miotte as Seen By Ruiz, Miotte vu par Raúl Ruiz
Dir. Raúl Ruiz, 78 min, 2001, 

Two artists, French and Chilean, document two others, American and French. Auder observes his friend Alice Neel as she paints and talks her way through her portrait of Margaret Evans Pregnant. Ruiz, over a three-year period, follows Miotte at work around the world. 

“It does not tell what Jean Miotte’s paintings are all about. Rather, it is about the process of painting, struggling, sweating, getting tired, fighting. It is one of the best films I have seen that deals with the struggle and hard work if making a painting.” – Jonas Mekas.

 

Program 4— Nov 23, 6:30pm

Matta ’85
Dir. Chris Marker, 15 min, 1985

Barbara Chase-Riboud
Produced by Milton Meltzer and Alvin Yudkoff, 6 min, 1971

Niki de Saint Phalle
Dir. François de Menil, Monique Alexander, 16 min, 1982

A Visit to Anthony Ramos’s Studio
Dir. Anthony Ramos, 6 min, 2024

Marker follows Matta for a guided tour of his exhibit, offering much more than just commentary on the work. Barbara Chase-Riboud narrates a full view of her life in Paris, describing her working methods of production, philosophy behind her sculptures, drawing, and even driving around the city.

 

All films in original version with English subtitles, unless when noted.