Oteiza and Cinema

Oteiza and Cinema. Museo Reina Sofía. Film and conference series. 17 - 21 October, 2011.

Tags: Sculpture, Cinema, Viewer, Experimental proposal.

Santos Zunzunegui, series curator: All of Oteiza’s work – once he finished his Experimental Proposal on sculpture and reached some specific conclusions in the field – focused on taking his aesthetic achievements and transplanting them to life.

He felt that as an artist his hands were empty, but he had gained the sensitivity to understand and organise social and political life that he needed to pass on to others.

When Oteiza ended his career as a sculptor – after he fulfilled what he called his experimental proposal with some final works of art that subdued their expressive elements and thus brought to an end the construction of Nothingness that he had pursued as a sculptor – he decided that his aesthetic experience could be transplanted to a field like film, which had the advantage of reaching the mass public.

Néstor Basterretxea. Operation H.

Jenaro Talens, Poet and essayist: Oteiza was proposing a kind of cinema for viewers who do not need to be told what to see. Instead, he wanted to offer things and let them fill in the gaps. It wasn’t that Oteiza was thinking about elitist viewers, but about viewers who think, not ones who buy whatever you throw at them.

Alain Resnais. Last Year at Marienbad.

Gabriel Villota, Theoretician and audiovisual historian:
In the 60s, people were going to the cinema to see things by Resnais, Godard and Pasolini. It was not only Hollywood cinema, especially in today’s terms. These were relatively accessible and narrative films, but very demanding intellectually.

Santos Zunzunegui: To the extent that film (we are talking about the end of the 50s, beginning of the 60s) is an art that fills a relatively central place in the construction of the collective mindset for a wide range of viewers, Oteiza thought that cinema provided a favourable landscape to transplant or introduce the new social sensibilities that he had extracted from his experimental process, provided that it was clear that the common viewer specifically goes to the cinema as an escape from life’s problems. Oteiza said that we may need a type of film that educates viewers or speaks to them or forces them to confront the problems of life that film usually makes us forget.

Paulino Viota, Film Director:
Oteiza was very ambitious. He wanted to bring together the avant-garde, aesthetic investigation and to the break with a tradition he thought was dehumanising, with something people could see and enjoy. But Oteiza couldn’t make those kinds of films, maybe because he was trying to square a very difficult circle.

Jenaro Talens: You can see in the Acteón script that when he thought of film, he was perhaps not particularly aware of what could be called the ‘rhetorical servants’ of this type of discourse. So, what he dreamt of doing with cinema could not be done, because film imposes criteria that he was not willing to accept, and this contradiction meant that he couldn’t be successful in film.

Santos Zunzunegui: No ‘cinema of Oteiza’ exists. Consider the projects that he was involved in to some extent – specifically the Acteón project and one just before that called Operation H, which is a commercial documentary film for the Huarte group.

audio clip from Operation H.

Operation H is not generally thought of as an Oteiza film, although he participated in it. And unfortunately, the finished Acteón was not as Oteiza had wanted it. The only reasonable series must include films that are somehow related to Oteiza’s aesthetic way of thinking and can establish a dialogue with it.

Samuel Beckett. Quadrat I+II.

Some films were mentioned by Oteiza in his writing. He used them as models or even counter-models and starting points. One example is Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, which he mentioned on several occasions, saying, it’s an initial approach to the problem of memory, the relationship between memory, the present and the future. It’s not what has to be done, but it gives us some clues about where to begin.

Then there are other films that have what could be called an “Oteizan” sensibility.

Javier Aguirre. Uts cero.

Javier Aguirre: Film director: The film begins with a little white dot lost against the blackness of the screen. Little by little, the dot gets bigger until it fills the entire screen, which then becomes white. At that point, it begins to go back to being the same dot it was at the beginning. This is Oteiza’s theory: occupation/de-occupation. The sound is a translation of the image. I told Luis de Pablo: you have to translate this. And he said it would be best using an organ.

Javier Aguirre. Uts cero.

I dedicated it to Malevich and Oteiza because it has no precedent in film. But looking through the history of the plastic arts, it bears some relation to Malevich as a painter and Oteiza as a sculptor.

Santos Zunzunegui: Then there are films that are reconstructed around, for example, the idea of de-occupation or emptying, the cessation of the story, for example Paulino Viota’s Contacts.

Clip from Contacts.

Paulino Viota: The plot, which was secret and not made explicit during the time of Franco’s dictatorship, dealt with some underground anti-Franco militants.

Clip from Contacts.

The film was made in the 70s. We wanted to make an avant-garde film and reading Quousque tandem…! was one of the influences. There were others like avant-garde art in general, but that was fundamental. The book has a very coherent and defined aesthetic that Oteiza expresses well. It fascinated and seduced us. We wanted to translate it, to do something in film that we thought had never been done before. It had been done in sculpture, in the book, in music and other places. Our idea was to translate what was space in Oteiza’s work into gaps in time – to make a work of art like an Oteiza sculpture, but using the dimension of time, which is characteristic of the narrative arts like film.

Gabriel Villota: In the Basque Country, the field of video art has developed, but Oteiza is almost never mentioned. We know from artists and professors like Josu Rekalde, who were in contact with Oteiza when they were young, in the late 70s and early 80s, that Oteiza insisted that video and audiovisual works had to capture and work with the idea of rhythm, which obviously came from his background as a sculptor.

Samuel Beckett. Quadratt I + II.