Alberte Pagán

Documentary about the history of experimental cinema in Spain. FRAGMENTS is a historical survey of “the other” Spanish Cinema — films that brazenly explored their artistic, poetic and conceptual potential. Spanish experimental cinema can be glimpsed in a series of important yet isolated events that FRAGMENTS compiles through various firsthand accounts, film excerpts and documents. For the first time in Spain, a documentary brings together the most relevant of a cinema that is slowly losing its invisibility.

A film by Alberte Pagán commissioned by Philipp Schmickl & Hans Falb. Konfrontationen is one of the oldest festivals for free and improvised music in Europe. It takes place in Nickelsdorf, Austria, on the border with Hungary, where Syrian refugees are not allowed to continue on their trip through Europe. This is a film about the 2014 festival — twenty performances where sight and sound don’t always go hand in hand, where the image confronts the sound and the sound escapes the image. A musical in which workers and audiences are as important and necessary as musicians.

τεμενος¹: Holy precinct. Like the Acropolis of Athens. Fence, border that surrounds it. Structural Boundary. τεμενος²: Place-event near the village of Lyssarea, in Arcadia, chosen by Gregory Markopoulos for the projection of his ultimate opus Eniaios. Robert Beavers organizes the event every four years. τεμενος³: Documentation of the pilgrimage to τεμενος², from Barbança to Lyssarea and back. The times and places get mixed up when they share the same precinct, i.e. the screen. The limits of the screen as a border, as a τεμενος¹, as structural boundary of a square space where mental work can take place. The time of Eniaios becomes space in this film, the emptiness of space, space as time inside the frontiers of the frame. Five seconds, on the way out —deferred editing. 125 frames, on the way back —contiguous editing. Sometimes the movement in space breaks free from this strict time boundary.

Living and working in Argentina, he asks his family for a portrait to keep their memory with him. They walk from Cenlhe to Rivadávia to take what will become the only surviving photograph in which the entire family appears — all except Faustino, whose absence defines the image.

Eclipse metanoico emerged from the improvisations of Pablo Sax and Andrés Castro for the Noia Festival. Pagán created a video piece specifically for this performance: over six months, he filmed a pear tree and everything unfolding around it, shaping a turbulent, hypnotic composition that we will see in its original form.

Nature is cruel. Life is cruel. A stupid race to escape death, a more stupid flight to death. A jungle of feelings. In the jungle there is no perspective, there are no straight lines, there are no perpendiculars or horizontality: only a mass of organs and exuberance. Cruel life The sound of death. The music of death. Nothing is true.

Images taken with a mini iPad, following the 11km perimeter walk going clockwise and under a temperature which reached 107ºF.

"Thesis, antithesis, and synthesis." This is how Pagán describes this work in which the interplay between the image, its reverse, and the sound of the "Haunted House" erases and makes the boundaries between past and present, interior and exterior, collide.