À Valparaiso 1963/2013

The polyphonic short film, A Valparaíso, shot by Joris Ivens in this city in 1963, its fragmentary mainstreaming and concurrency invites a discursive approach that goes beyond the canonical distribution of roles between sender and receiver, between authors and spectators. This breaks the routine subordination.

Unlike the common observations that have usually been made ​​of this film, that is, selecting from its striking images, we wanted to dispense them altogether to keep only the text -by Chris Marker- turning, just as in the original work, to an assembly based on the poetic association and in the recurrence of elements and allusions, with an explicit desire to regain the creative possibilities of décalage between image and text, to highlight on this distortion in continuity so to show the distrust Marker and Ivens always had towards the supposed transparency and innocence of images.

Today, when technology makes it possible and continually encourages the incessant production of photographs and video and its instantaneous diffusion, we need words more than ever. And a few words, such as Marker´s, that stop at the dialectical status of images, in excess and overflow to question their alleged evidence, the verité of what we might come to think that is “naturally” before our eyes.