Encounters with landscape -Marta Andreu

20.04.23 15:15 Bolzano, Capitol 2

Marta Andreu

In 2017 Marta Andreu created WALDEN, a space for documentary creation. Since 2000 she teaches documentary seminars and workshops internationally (DocNomads, Di Tella University, EICTV, CCC, Frontera Sur, AricaLab, DocumentaMadrid, DOCSP, Ibermedia, Playdoc, Ventana Madrid, CIMA…) and she works as a tutor for Eurodoc, Torino Film Lab, Visions du Réel, DocMontevideo. Since 2011 She’s a member of the World Cinema Fund. In 2004 she founded Playtime and produced LA TERRA HABITADA (Visions du Réel 2009), CUCHILLO DE PALO (Berlinale 2010), SALÓME (NordiskPanorma 2014, Best Film Award), OLEG (Rotterdam 2015); AMANECER (FICCI 2018, Best Film Award).

Surviving Landscapes

We know it, and we feel it probably every day.... Nature seems to perish. There is a visible, palpable wound that does not go away and can do nothing but remind us of our part. Indeed, “places die like people, even though they seem to survive”, as a french poet once said. What to do about it? Or, more precisely, what can art do about it? What can cinema do? I would like to propose a journey from a hundred-year old recovered image of a volcano (from a film that Jean Epstein made in Italy in 1923) to a painted mountain obsessively chased by Cezanne more than eighty times and later mourned twice by cinema (in two films by Jean Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet). And from there to a fragile encounter between a mountain and a contemporary filmmaker, Salome Lamas, on a Portuguese island. Through bits and pieces of cinema, poetry, painting, and maybe even music, I seek to remind us that perhaps it is through creation that we can restore to the landscape the possibility of resistance and survival.

ENCOUNTERS WITH LANDSCAPE

We experience the sublime when our imagination fails to comprehend the greatness of natural events, in the process of determining concepts of understanding, and supplants this failure with a delight stemming from its ability to grasp these aspects of nature by virtue of an idea of reason. That idea appropriates the supersensible and human moral nature. To experience the sublime sensibility, a body, being human, and being finite are preconditions. Was it a lack of sensibility?