I See a Darkness : Film Programme supported by Science Foundation Ireland.

A short film programme will be presented on November 20th with films chosen to engage with the scientific framework of Science Week. The films suggest ways in which the dominant or more conventional aesthetics and visual vocabularies of science can be challenged and invigorated by artists and filmmakers, but also by scientists who draw on artistic influences.

Insight into Atoms (Regards sur les Atomes)
Alexis Martinet, 1991, 28 mins

Alexis Martinet, a contributor to the film I See a Darkness, is Director of the Institute of Scientific Cinematography in Paris.

A respected physicist, and someone who knew Lucien Bull personally, Martinet has made educational films on science but with an artist’s eye, and draws on a rich and distinctly French cinematic tradition to create unique works. His films remind us of other imaginaries available to science for exploring complex subject matter.

Regards sur Les Atomes is a beautifully shot film, using dance and acrobatic sequences, and will be screened for the first time with specially created English subtitles at Photo Museum Ireland.

“An essay on physics inspired by Alice in Wonderland, Regards sur les Atoms examines transmission electron microscopy but is presented in the style of a fantastic tale. In an enigmatic castle, a little boy goes in search of knowledge using his thoughts, represented by a young acrobat. The child thus discovers the transmission electron microscope which is described in detail. Driven by his thoughts in a mad dash through the physical world, the boy realises that the apparent disorder he perceives is often only a hidden order.” (Alexis Martinet)

Peggy and Fred in Hell: The Prologue
Leslie Thornton, 1984, 16 mm, black-and-white, 21 minutes

“The story is minimal, ascetic: something has happened; two children survive and are observed traversing a ruined, apocalyptic terrain, interacting with the traces of technologies, the detritus of sense. Somehow television is always on, at least somewhere, and Peggy and Fred mimic and cajole, embody and enunciate traces of the world. Not necessarily their world, but ours. Seen through their eyes, everything is strange and uncanny [..]

One of Leslie Thornton’s earliest interests was mathematics, a fascination that was encouraged by her father Gunnar Thornton, a nuclear physicist and engineer, and her grandfather, an electrical engineer. During the Second World War both men had –unbeknownst to each other – worked on the Manhattan Project, the top secret development of the atomic bomb […]

Thornton’s dark and magisterial Peggy and Fred in Hell, in its strange divarications between promissory terror and transcendence, might be read as a profound examination of the tropologies of cold-war apocalyptics, the vicissitudes of conflicting narratives, and what one might call a certain paratactics of the image. Peggy and Fred in Hell charts a troubled trajectory between event and mediation, with a profound skepticism throughout concerning the favoured foregroundings of technical modernity: photography’s verisimilitude and the index of the photo-chemical trace as guarantor of the real, the consequent presumption of a privileged link to the true and actual, and the promise of recuperability through ever-extenuating forms of technical reproducibility.

The relationships between technology, society, identity, and subjectivity that underpin contemporary media culture no longer pertain here, though they persist as enduring shadows and afterimages.”

*Quotes from Thomas Zummer Paradise Crushed, or:“…just stand in that quicksand for a moment, this shot won’t take long…”: Some notations on the works and life of Leslie Thornton Senses of Cinema

Three Cheers for the Whale (Vive la Baleine)

Chris Marker, Mario Ruspoli, 1972, 17 mins

Three Cheers for the Whale offers a different perspective on marine life to that of Jacques Cousteau’s films referenced in I See a Darkness.

In a style distinct from Marker’s other work, yet still displaying his aesthetic and political sensibilities, this short film chronicles the history of mankind’s relationship with the largest and most majestic of marine mammals, and graphically exposes their slaughter by the fishing industry.

“Somewhat a departure for Chris Marker, this issue-based documentary delivered its sobering warning against commercial whaling and industrial extermination. It may be, above all, a fascinating act of myth-making—illustrating the importance of whales with remarkable sources and citations.” (Icarus films).

When

2pm Sunday November 20th, 2022

Where

Photo Museum Ireland

How much

Free