Artists Space

In The Poem About Love You Don't Write The Word Love
Film Series at Anthology Film Archives
Program 6

Screening
February 12, 2007, 7:30pm

Program 6 of the film series accompanying the exhibition In The Poem About Love You Don't Write The Word Love, held at Anthology Film Archives.

A figure, silhouetted by the sun, pushes a bike with a wooden contraption anchored across its handlebars, upon which various obscured objects hang. The figure is situated on a dirt road next to a body of water, which stretches out behind them in the distance. Urban buildings are visible in the far distance.
[A figure, silhouetted by the sun, pushes a bike with a wooden contraption anchored across its handlebars, upon which various obscured objects hang. The figure is situated on a dirt road next to a body of water, which stretches out behind them in the distance. Urban buildings are visible in the far distance.]

Avi Mograbi, How I Learned to Overcome My Fear and Love Arik Sharon (1997)
Videotape, colour, sound; 61 minutes. Courtesy of the artist.
Mograbi’s cautionary docufiction How I Learned to Overcome My Fear and Love Arik Sharon plays with the genre of cinema verité revealing at every step the thin line between the fiction and the reality of his persona as a filmmaker seduced by the Israeli prime minister. Mograbi complicates the viewer’s relationship with what he or she is watching by including them in the problem of political identification.

Walid Raad, Hostage—The Bachar Tapes (2001)
DVD, colour, sound; 16 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Video Data Bank, Chicago.
Raad’s video entitled Hostage—The Bachar Tapes, is just one of many hundreds or possibly thousands of inventions from the fictional archive of the Atlas Group Project. It plays with the conventional formats of the video documentary and the witness testimonial, to document what constitutes an alternative history of Lebanon and in particular, the Western hostage crisis in Beirut in the ‘80s. The video fluctuates between modes of encryption and decryption, retaining a critique internal to itself, never allowing itself to solidify into a fixed entity.