Tag Archives: Georges Bataille

“There were some joyful moments in 1968, feast-like, maybe Dyonisian here and there, but mainly we were serious and grave, first because we hated the greasy laugh of our elders, but also because we could not get satisfaction.” — Patrick Deval, director of ACÉPHALE*

As part of its Zanzibar Films series, Cinefamily presents a rare screening of ACÉPHALE, a 1968 feature that documents the lives of young Parisians navigating the immediate aftermath of May ’68. One translation of its title—taken from Georges Bataille’s journal—indicates the need to move beyond rational thought:

“I became a bit radical in my refusal of Western civilization, constantly raving about the end of the white man. Rouch was closer to this view, becoming himself a joyful African in the oral tradition. But that was not so far from Rimbaud, Artaud, or Gauguin when he decided to ‘ensavage’ himself.” — Deval*

ACÉPHALE will be preceded by a screening of Serge Bard’s DETRUISEZ-VOUS.

ACÉPHALE, Saturday, August 26, at 6 pm.

CINEFAMILY, 611 North Faifax Avenue, Los Angeles.

cinefamily.org/films/zanzibar/

Image: Scene from Acéphale.

See Deval’s interview in Senses of Cinema:

Deval in ’68: An Interview with Patrick Deval

CONTEMPORARY ART AND WALTER BENJAMIN’S ARCADES

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THE ARCADES: CONTEMPORARY ART AND WALTER BENJAMIN, a new exhibition at the Jewish Museum, “brings together contemporary art works inspired, consciously and unconsciously, by Walter Benjamin, one of the twentieth century’s most original and enigmatic thinkers. Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is an undergraduate art-history staple, but true Benjaminiacs consider his massive, unfinished Arcades Project to be the writer’s magnum opus. What began as a short essay on the glass-ceilinged Paris Arcades of the mid-nineteenth century (the modern shopping mall’s ancestor) spiralled out into a warren of notes, citations, and commentaries forming a restless survey of modernity.”*

Benjamin’s Arcades Project—the notes for which he left with Georges Bataille before killing himself on the Pyrenees in 1940 after leaving Nazi-occupied France—was made up of thirty-six folders on such subjects as “Fashion,” “Mirrors,” “Panorama,” “Dream City and Dream House,” and “Flâneur,” (a term Benjamin popularized). For THE ARCADES exhibition, curator Jens Hoffman (assisted by Shira Backer) has brought together works by Walead Beshty, Andrea Bowers, Chris Burden, Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, Andreas Gursky, Pierre Huyghe, Mike Kelley, Collier Schorr, Cindy Sherman, Taryn Simon, and James Welling.

THE ARCADES: CONTEMPORARY ART AND WALTER BENJAMIN, through August 6.

THE JEWISH MUSEUM, 1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street, New York City.

thejewishmuseum.org/exhibitions/the-arcades-contemporary-art-and-walter-benjamin

*David Wallace, “Walter Benjamin’s Unfinished Opus, Revisted Through Contemporary Art,” The New Yorker, May 9, 2017:

newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/walter-benjamins-unfinished-magnum-opus-revisited-through-contemporary-art

A view of The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin, at the Jewish Museum. Artwork, all by Adam Pendleton: Black Dada Reader (wall work #1), 2016; what is…?/Chagall (study), 2017; Dada Dancers (study), 2016.

Photograph by Will Ragozzino–Social Shutterbug

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Tag Archives: Georges Bataille

ANNETTE MICHELSON — ON THE EVE OF THE FUTURE

ACÉPHALE AT CINEFAMILY

CONTEMPORARY ART AND WALTER BENJAMIN’S ARCADES