Friday 13 March 2009, 19.00

Spiral Jetty, Robert Smithson, 1970, 16mm, 32 min

Conjoining and dislocating fragments of a materialisation and an idea, Spiral Jetty records the processes around and within the construction of his vast earthwork Spiral Jetty at Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah. Filmed by Smithson, alongside Nancy Holt, Spiral Jetty captures on film the dialectical collision between liquid and solid, the fragile suspension of a point or time between the polarities of matter and ephemera. Yet, critical of the museum's potential commodification of an intangible history into convenient artefacts, Smithson's documentation of Spiral Jetty simultaneously announces its own contradiction. The site of the film negates the jetty's non-site but also and importantly opens a potential space between these limits. 

 Atomic Park, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, 2004, 35mm, 9 min

Shot on location at White Sands, New Mexico, very near Trinity Site-the location of the first atomic explosion-AtomicPark captures sunbathers and tourists taking in the striking sun. The film presents a national park, a white desert, a natural exhibition space where each presence, each movement can give way to different interpretations and to a new reading of the setting. On the soundtrack we hear faintly the voice of Marilyn Monroe in her desperate and accusatory monologue about manly violence in The Misfits (1961). Partially obscured by a degree of over-exposure, AtomicPark evokes the contradictory experiences of leisure and danger.

La Jetée, Chris Marker, 1962, 35mm, 28 min

Marker's seminal science fiction photo-roman (photo-novel) is set in a post-apocalyptic present where Paris's surviving inhabitants live underground in the galleries of the Palais de Chaillot. La Jetée's circular, paradoxical narrative frames the story of an individual trapped in time. Experimented on by his captors he is forced to travel within his memory's mental images into a past and future built on recollections and connections. The hope of deliverance, or the pursuit of change, is based on the strength of memory's images, the premise that if one were ‘able to conceive, or to dream another time perhaps would they be able live in it.' As such, he is trapped not only in memory, but also within history, as caught between fragments of still images and text we follow the fractured relations between fiction and memory full circle, from formation to destruction, stillness to movement.

Toute la Mémoire du Monde (All the World's Memory), Alain Resnais, 1956, 35mm, 20 min

A grand tour of the vast processes of classification, documentation and preservation in Paris Bibliothèque Nationale, Resnais's Toute la Mémoire du Monde pursues humanity's fragile and absurd attempt to verify knowledge as a concrete, historical form. Within the corridors, tombs, offices and shelves of the library, each book, periodical, object and oddity becomes part of a huge catalogue, split and split again into groupings and compartments, laws and lists. Expanding with each year this museum of words and images populated and administered by scholars and the industrious staff, aims at the ultimate dissolution of mystery by the conservation of all memories. However within these ever-increasing mounds of material, there is only ever less certainty as the promise of some ultimate truth becomes ever more entangled in the particularities of each number, shelf and page.

Programme duration 90 minutes.

Tate Modern  Starr Auditorium
£5 (£4 concessions), booking recommended

    

This event is related to the The Unilever Series: Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster exhibition