facs of life

TATE BRITAIN - Turner Prize Exhibition : Facs of Life

Wednesday 8 December 2010, 14.00-17.50

For the last in the series of the IMAGE IN QUESTION at the Tate Britain The Otolith Group have invited Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson to explore their effort to realize a cinema that would both be an encounter with Deleuze's thought, as well as an encounter with the traces left of a collective process which were the courses taught by Deleuze at Vincennes. The session will include the first UK screening of the film Facs of LIfe (2009) which they have made with some of the former students from Vincennes, as well as another screening of Through the Letterbox (2010), where a close reading of the footage from the lectures allows for an exploration of an expanded version of their cinematic research/work.

Screenings and excerpts followed by a roundtable discussion with The Otolith Group - Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar, Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson.

Facs of Life (2009) 116mins, attempts to map the trajectories of life and thought through a series of encounters: with the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze; with video footage of Deleuze’s courses at Vincennes (1975-76); with several of the students that attended the seminar and who appear in these images; with the woods of Vincennes where the university buildings, pulled down in 1980, once stood; with students of the new university at St Denis and with the phantoms of revolution, both cinematic and political, that continue to haunt our desires.

Through the Letterbox (2010) presents a selection of rarely seen archive footage from Deleuze’s seminar at Vincennes refilmed from a TV screen and reframed in 16/9 letterbox format. Images destined for small-screen viewing are shown as though they were ‘cinema’ by the simple means of letterbox framing in a move that interrogates the implications of posting such images ‘through the letterbox’. Different postings of varying duration and composition are addressed to specific correspondents.

Artists and filmmakers Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson are co-founders of Terminal Beach, a cross-media arts platform to investigate new configurations of image, sound, text and spectatorship. Facs of Life, their first feature film, premiered at FID Marseille (2009) and has been shown at numerous festivals and art spaces including BAFICI Independent Film Festival, Jihlava Documentary Festival, Il Vento del Cinema, Ludwig Museum, Lucca Film Festival, Fundação Clovis Salgado and 16beaver.
The duo are currently working on a new film, Girl from the Nouvelle Vague.