[csaa-forum] Jalal Toufic screening

[Dimitris Vardoulakis]

Jalal Toufic will be screening some of his experimental films on 
*Wednesday 12 March 5 -7 pm, at Federation Hall, Victorian College of 
the Arts, 234 St Kilda Rd* (see: 
http://www.vca.unimelb.edu.au/cfiartists/#cs_2837)

The screening will be followed by a conversation between Jalal Toufic 
and Deane Williams.
Everybody welcome!

The films to be screened are:

*/Saving Face/**,* video, 8 minutes, 2003.
Were all the candidates’ faces posted on the walls of Lebanon during the 
parliamentary campaign of 2000 waiting for the results of the elections? 
No. As faces, they were waiting to be saved. Far better than any 
surgical face-lift or digital retouching, it was the physical removal of 
part of the poster of the face of one candidate so that the face of 
another candidate would partially appear under it; as well as the 
accretions of posters and photographs over each other that produced the 
most effective face-lift, and that proved a successful face-saver for 
all concerned. We have in these resultant recombinant posters one of the 
sites where Lebanese culture in specific, and Arabic culture in general, 
mired in an organic view of the body, in an organic body, exposes itself 
to inorganic bodies.

*/Mother and Son; or, That Obscure Object of Desire (Scenes from an 
Anamorphic Double Feature)/*, video, 41 minutes, 2006.
My experience of collaborating in an untimely manner with Gus Van Sant 
was not a happy one. Had he heeded my suggestions, he would not have 
tried to do a remake of Hitchcock’s /Psycho/ (1960) in which he 
reproduced each frame of the original largely in the manner of 
Hitchcock, but would instead have done a /Psycho/ in the manner of 
Sokurov, so that the resultant film would have been: /Psycho/, School of 
Sokurov (as /The Betrothal/, circa 1640-50, is by the School of 
Rembrandt). Such a programmatic film would have proved all the more 
appropriate when Sokurov went on to do a seemingly programmatic 
cinematic work, /Russian Arc/ (2002), a 96-minute film videotaped in one 
continuous shot. Since Van Sant did not heed my suggestions for his 
remake of /Psycho /(1998), I did /Mother and Son; or, That Obscure 
Object of Desire (Scenes from an Anamorphic Double Feature)/, 2006, in 
lieu of the failed untimely collaboration.

*/The Sleep of Reason: This Blood Spilled in My Veins/*, video, 32 
minutes, 2002.
The organic dying of a (resurrectable) human is as nothing compared to 
that of an animal, exemplarily of a bull in a corrida; the only 
phenomenon that equals in intensity the death of a bull in a corrida or 
of a cow in a slaughterhouse is the resurrection of a human, Lazarus 
coming out from the grave. The living woman in T. S. Eliot’s /The Love 
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock/ is found settling her pillow to sleep when 
she encounters the undead. Why are you settling the pillow, why are you 
so sleepy? What disclosure are you thus trying to elude? “Tell you all,” 
Lazarus says in Eliot’s poem, and would that “all” not also include 
himself? Did Lazarus come back to tell himself about death? And did he 
find himself sleeping then?


-- 

Dimitris Vardoulakis
The Centre for Ideas
Faculty of The Victorian College of the Arts
The University of Melbourne
234 St Kilda Road
Southbank, Vic 3006
Australia

Tel: + 61 437 103 563
Fax: + 61 3 9682 1841
Email: dva at unimelb.edu.au
www.vca.unimelb.edu.au/Staff.aspx?topicID=303&staffID=138