Our September ART SEEN program visits the realm of science fiction and post-apocalyptic representations with Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962) and Ben Rivers’ Slow Action (2011). Artist Film Club presents: Slater Bradley’s she was my la jetée and FRIEZE VIDEO: Remembering Chris Marker.

The first in our post-apocalyptic double-feature is the landmark featurette by Chris Marker, La Jetée, in which a tale of time travel is told through still images. Established in the context of a post-nuclear Third World War, where the survivors live underground in the Palais de Chaillot galleries in post-apocalyptic Paris, La Jetée unfolds into a scientific quest to revisit the past and to ‘rescue the future’. It’s an exploration of memory, time and space, and the advancement of life on our planet in a compelling and succinct manifestation of imagery.

Following La Jetée, is the recent work Slow Action by British filmmaker and artist Ben Rivers. Slow Action is a post-apocalyptic science fiction film which exists somewhere between documentary, ethnographic study and fiction. Earth in the distant future, when the sea level has risen to absurd heights forming new isolated islands and archipelagos. Two narrators read accounts from a great library of Utopias, describing the four islands seen in the film.

Ben Rivers is the recipient of FIPRESCI International Critics Prize, 68th Venice Film Festival for his first feature film Two Years At Sea; the Baloise Art Prize, Art Basel 42, 2011; shortlisted for the Jarman Award 2010/2012; Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists, 2010. 

Artist Film Club:
Slater Bradley‘s she was my la jetée. Shooting on super 8 and HD film and integrating subtly moving stills, in “she was my la jetée” Bradley fixates on the face of an alluring woman, whose hair blows in the wind as she speeds down a river atop a boat. The resulting meditation on the changing nature of film in the modern world is mirrored in the narrative, in which the artist looks back at an unattainable past love, as though recalling a dream.

FRIEZE VIDEO: Remembering Chris Marker (produced in association with Pundersons Gardens). Curator Stuart Comer, artist Beatrice Gibson and artist/writer Jeremy Millar pay tribute to the late Chris Marker.

Part of Nitehawk’s Art Seen signature series. In partnership with frieze.