Cine sin autor. Workshop in Medialab-Prado

> Project Description 
> Goals
> Methodology
> Dates for the Workshop
> Ways of Participating

Project Description

The Cine sin Autor Collective, will be celebrating four sessions to reflect on, work on and debate matters related to Film in the 21st century. Grounded on the ideas expressed in their Second Manifesto, which they plan to publish next year, that are based on the practice they have developed in recent years in Madrid and Toulouse and the emergence of 15M as a horizontal social movement for new politics, that works by assembly.

There have been basically two kinds of film politics, understood as theoretical articulations, in Film History:

Studio politics, which during half a century has constituted a hegemonic system, still very much persistent, and Authorship politics, that starts in the 1950s, opening up the industrial production, and gives directors with small professional teams the status of cinematographic creator.

Studio politics produced and produces a type of image, aesthetics and the models for FILM-MONEY, and it also represents the subjectivity of one specific class, that of the financial technicians and the film professionals. The author politics enables a kind of cinema that comes from the individual and individualistic subjectivity of the directors.

Currently, in the 21st century, we are witnessing the emergence of a new image, one that is arising from the common population, that used to be reduced to a spectator role, who now distance themselves from the subjectivity of the industry owners and that of the professionals: an image immersed in the population and made by all kinds of new operators.

From Cine sin Autor we announce the need for a new Politics of Collectivity, in order to give a new value status to the audiovisual image that is produced by the population itself, from different locations, groups, associations, education institutions and all kinds of organized collectives. As a productive social force we believe that the population in general, protected by a new film politics, is in perfect condition to develop the new filmic image of the 21st century, distanced from the narratives of the aesthetic business developed by studio politics and also distanced from the individualism of the sector’s professionals within the politics of the author, who many times are also immersed in the commercial aspects of the industry.

In order to do so, a politics of collectivity must leave everything we’ve formerly known as film in crisis, both its industrial model and its narrative, formal and aesthetic models, as well as the way it has been made, its editing procedures, its distribution channels and its social management.

During the sessions that Cine sin Autor is celebrating in Medialab Prado in Madrid, we will talk about how nowadays a change of paradigm in film production and management models is possible.

Currently CSA is developing filmic work in the neighborhoods of Almenara and Valdeacederas, in the Tetuán district of Madrid, it has made a movie in the area of Humanes also in Madrid and has started some experiences in the city of Toulouse, France.

The initial theses are in the first text published in November of 2008 in Madrid by the Centro de Documentación Crítica: Manifiesto. Realismo social extremo para el siglo XXI (Manifesto. Extreme Social Realism for the 21st Century). Gerardo Tudurí. Versión 1.0. Madrid, 2008. 

Currently they are about to publish their second manifesto: “Cine sin Autor XXI. La Política de la Colectividad” (Cine sin Autor 21. The Politics of Collectivity)

Goals 

1. Create consciousness of the new cinematographic processes that enable a Real Politics of Collectivity in Film making, from its environments and regular spaces of life, taken as the new stages in the cinema of the 21st century.
2. Learn and edbate the new local and collective procedures of production applied to all the stages that take part in filmic production: film making, circulation and management.
3. Debate on possible changes in the legislation and cultural policies for audiovisuals in light of this Politics of Collectivity that breaks with the industrial and authorial thought and promotes a re-articulation of the sector, the creation of local platforms and open study systems of participative film production, managed horizontally.
4. Acquire the key readings for a critical revision of Film History and Film Theory in light of this new politics. 

Methodology

Each work session will last 3 hours:
Each of these sessions will be divided in two parts: 

1. During the first part we will analyze key texts on film: historical, theoretical and texts by the Cine sin Autor collective.
   Topics for each session:
   
   a) The Politics of Collectivity in the frame of Film History and the idea of Authorlessness as a key element to produce culture in a different manner.
   

   b) New concepts for film.

   c) The production of films under the Politics of Collectivity and the new political functions of the authorlessness.

   d) The System of Open Studies. New platforms for film production.

2. In the second part of each session
   
   a ) We will analyze and debate the stages of film making under these new concepts, seeing and listening to different cinematic and audiovisual materials where we can search the new concepts of film in its development.
   b) See some filmic documents done by the collective, where these new concepts apply. 

Dates for the Workshop:

Once a month from January to April of 2012. 

Ways of Participating

Any person interested in deconstructing and deactivating the ways of seeing and, above all, producing the audiovisual world within which film has colonized us for over a century. Any person that would like to venture to create another kind of film for the 21st century.