(2018, 84 minutes)
directed by Jean Luc Godard

Do you still remember how, long ago, we trained our thoughts? Most often we'd start from a dream. We wondered how, in total darkness, colours of such intensity could emerge within us. In a soft, low voice. Saying great things. Surprising, deep and accurate matters. Image and words. Like a bad dream written on a stormy night. Under western eyes. The lost paradises. War is here.

The Image Book (Le Livre d'image) directed by Jean Luc Godard has been described as an avant-garde horror essay and is composed of a series of films, paintings, and selections of music tied together with narration and additional original footage by Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville. In this way, the film is similar to his iconic film series Histoire(s) du cinema in examining the history of cinema and its inability to address the atrocities of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Writing for Film Comment, Amy Taubin explained,
"From the first, Godard's movies have been informed by his belief in film as the medium in which the history of the 20th century is written. His collage films, beginning with the epic Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998), describe how the medium in which this history of the world is inscribed shifts from celluloid, which is projected to a collective audience in theaters, to videotape, the Internet, and discs, all available for personal viewing; and how these works also could be used to "write" image histories as personal as literary histories always have been. To these mediums has been added, in the 21st century, digital cinema ... continue reading >>

 

1966 / 121 minutes / French/Arabic with English subtitles / Black and White
Directed by: Gillo Pontecorvo

Please join Cultivate Cinema Circle and Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center as we present a year-long series entitled Post-Colonialisms: World Cinema and Human Consequence.

One of the most influential political films in history, The Battle of Algiers, by Gillo Pontecorvo, vividly re-creates a key year in the tumultuous Algerian struggle for independence from the occupying French in the 1950s. As violence escalates on both sides, children shoot soldiers at point-blank range, women plant bombs in cafés, and French soldiers resort to torture to break the will of the insurgents. Shot on the streets of Algiers in documentary style, the film is a case study in modern warfare, with its terrorist attacks and the brutal techniques used to combat them. Pontecorvo's tour de force has astonishing relevance today.

 

1988 / 80 minutes / English / Color
Directed by: John Akomfrah

Please join Cultivate Cinema Circle and Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center as we present a year-long series entitled Post-Colonialisms: World Cinema and Human Consequence.

In Testament, the condition of the postcolony is embodied in the figure of activist turned television reporter Abena who returns to contemporary Ghana, for the first time since the 1966 coup that ended President Kwame Nkrumah's experiment in African socialism.

Adrift in a 'war zone of memories' Abena is caught in the tension between public history and private memory. The film is characterized by a depopulated frame and a deliberately cold look that evokes an emotional landscape of postcolonial trauma.

 

2010 / 106 minutes / French with English subtitles / Color
Directed by: Claire Denis

Please join Cultivate Cinema Circle and Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center as we present a year-long series entitled Post-Colonialisms: World Cinema and Human Consequence.

"No more smirking. We're stopping the bullshit right now and staying put."

The regular army is preparing to re-establish order in the country. To clean up. To eliminate the rebel officer also known as The Boxer and rid the countryside of roving child soldiers.

All the expatriates have gone home, getting out before things turn nasty.

Of the Vials - coffee planters who have lived here for two generations - Maria stands firm. She's not about to give in to rumors or abandon her harvest at the first sound of gunfire.

Just like her father-in-law and her ex-husband who is also the father of her son (a little too much of a slacker in her opinion) she is convinced that Cherif, mayor of the neighboring town, will protect them. If she asks him, he will save the plantation. He has a personal guard, a private militia of tough guys, heavily armed and well trained.