SACCADES
Reimer van Tuinen and Gawie Keyser – ‘Saccades’
Supermarket shelves, a glimpse of cleavage, open heart surgery and smiling faces. Researchers have known for quite some time that the eye traverses screens, shelves and pages searching for patterns, seductions and meanings. The eye cannot rest, but flightily seeks meaning, jumping from point to point. Even if the eye stares at a blank wall it still looks for the recognisable. The choreography of these eye movements, referred to as saccades, are like maps to our soul.
Our guides Reimer van Tuinen and Gawie Keyser take us on an expedition through our image culture and help us examine how moving images seduce, provoke or string our eyes and soul along.
How is capitalism visualised in cinema? How is it made to look human or inhuman? Is it possible to sincerely protest and revolt against or criticise capitalism from within the Hollywood dream factories? Or are the attacks on capitalism in films such as Wall Street or Margin Call merely the system’s defence mechanisms which re-legitimise it? Is it possible to create a visual language beyond capitalism?
On the basis of a collage of images and film excerpts, Gawie and Reimer guide us through the contemporary soaps, ‘popular protest cinema from Hollywood’, European art house films, Italian and French comedies from the 1950s, Soviet cinema, Latin American and African films and the uber-Dutch living room atmosphere.
Saccades provides an evening-long image overload dissecting capitalism in the process.
Saccades is part of the Work Songs programme curated by Monnik.
More information:
http://blogs.groene.nl/film/ / monnik.org/Saccades-Capitalism-Catch-22