Cinema: a spring in the heart of America

This spring’s major cycle honors not two but three American filmmakers: Les Blank, a tutelary figure of documentary filmmaking (1935-2013), famous for Burden of Dreams (1982), the story of the catastrophic filming of Werner Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo in the Amazon jungle, and the Ross brothers, his claimed heirs, young multi-award-winning documentary filmmakers at growing notoriety. These three have in common a radical aspiration to independence and a taste for encounters that allow them to access the intimacy of their subjects and to keep track of an era, a place and their crops. They film an America of the margins and local music; they reinvest the mythical imagination of the frontier, great rivers and wide open spaces with a power and a lyricism that borrows as much from the means of fiction as from a strictly documentary approach.

After this slice of America, the month of June will be combined with the Féminin Singulier, in the company of a generation of filmmakers who have in common that they are also visual artists. A cycle in partnership with the National Center for Plastic Arts which is part of a perspective of contemporary redefinition of documentary writing and offers us a cinema open to the outside world. Formal research that will find an extension with the session of Du court, always dedicated to Paul Heintz whose work comes in different artistic forms.

his spring, La cinémathèque du documentaire à lq Bpi invites you to several invitations to travel. Trésors du doc ​​takes us to the South Seas in the footsteps of Robert Flaherty‘s Moana with Monica Flaherty. Fenêtre sur festivals welcomes the Panorama of Colombian cinema for two screenings open to young Colombian creation. In the preview dedicated to The Republic of Silence, we follow the journey of its director, Diana El Jeiroudi, from the Syria of her childhood to the Berlin of exile. As for the Yeux doc à midi, they give us the “latest news from Asia” with twelve films that take us in the footsteps of populations facing economic, cultural, political and climatic upheavals.

It is also a portrait of the France of yesterday and today that we will be confronted, first of all with The ideal Cinematheque of the suburbs of the world which gives carte blanche to Ciné-archives, the audiovisual fund of the French communist party and labor movement. In the project he is presenting at the Fabrique des films, Jonathan Rescigno draws the portrait of a determined generation that rushes into life head first; the previews offered by France Télévisions and ARTE will respectively discuss the fate of unaccompanied minor migrants and the hospital crisis.

On the other side of these echoes of the world, the meetings of Rencontres d’Images documentaires will continue this season to explore the intimate space of literature, Jérôme Prieur and Jean-Daniel Pollet immersing themselves in Marcel Proust, René Char and Francis Ponge.

An immersion in the work of artists that we find deployed in the conferences, starting with the seminar “Le cinema en acte” in partnership with the EHESS, where Claire Simon and Stéphane Breton analyze films by Sergueï Loznitsa this year, Jean Rouch, Johan van der Keuken, Mosco Boucault and many others. As for the conferences of the Permanent University of Paris, they are devoted to the school, how to film it, its students and its teachers, each film being preceded by an introductory conference by Anne Charvin.

Ready to embark with us on a cinematic road trip? So quickly discover the complete program offered this spring by La cinémathèque du documentaire à la Bpi, or download the season’s program in PDF (french only, 1 Mo)