When Rain Clouds Gather
Éric Baudelaire, 15 – 27 October

With excitement we present the second edition of the ongoing film series When Rain Clouds Gather with the artist and filmmaker Éric Baudelaire.

From 15 – 27 October 2024, the two films The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masai Adachi, and 27 Years without Images (2011) and When There Is No More Music to Write, and Other Roman Stories (2022) will be shown alternately during the regular opening hours of the Kunsthalle Bern in the main hall of the institution’s first floor. Éric Baudelaire’s films explore the ways in which personal narratives of artists intersect with larger historical contexts. By examining the roles of identity, memory, and landscape, Baudelaire offers profound insights into the complex relationship between art and politics. An artist talk on the 25th of October at 9 p.m. with Éric Baudelaire and iLiana Fokianaki offers insights into the research process of the filmography of Beaudelaire and the chance to reflect on these two films.

The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masai Adachi, and 27 Years without Images
1 h 06 min, 2011

It is this complicated, dark, and always suspenseful story Éric Baudelaire is using the documentary format to trace the lives of Fusako and May Shigenobu, mother and daughter and Masao Adachi, a screenwriter and radical activist filmmaker. Fusako was involved in an extremist left-wing faction, the Japanese Red Army, and involved in a number of terrorist operations. May, her daughter, born in Lebanon, only discovered Japan at the age of twenty-seven, after her mother’s arrest in 2000. Adachi was also underground in Lebanon for several decades before being sent back to his native country. In his years as a film director, he had been one of the instigators of a ‘theory of landscape’ – fûkeiron: through filming landscapes, Adachi sought to reveal the structures of oppression that underpin and perpetuate the political system. Filmed on Super 8 mm, and in the manner of fûkeiron, Baudelaire’s film is a feast of contemporary panoramas of Tokyo and Beirut blended with archival footage, TV clips and film excerpts as the backdrop for May and Adachi’s voices and memories. They speak of everyday life, of exile, politics and cinema, and their fascinating overlaps.
From the text of Jean-Pierre Rehm, FIDMarseille catalogue

When There Is No More Music to Write, and Other Roman Stories
59 min, 2022

Underneath the lengthy title of Éric Baudelaire’s new film, three films are hiding, separated by three credit rolls and three titles (Four Flat Tires, The Lost Score, and When There Is No More Music to Write). They evoke the figure of avant-garde composer Alvin Curran in his relationship to Rome, where he settled in the mid-1960s, and the music he created there, mainly within the famous Musica Elettronica Viva collective. But as the sub-title of the last of these films indicates “of about Alvin Curran”, the project is no less a portrait than a collaboration: Baudelaire’s collaboration with the composer, whom he never films in person, but whose thoughts and sounds he borrows. Baudelaire, in league with the oeuvre he documents, plays down the figure of the author and the pretension to an art as a single unit. Three times over the film ends and restarts, with the certainty that by replaying the end, everything can begin again.
From the text of Antoine Thirion, Cinéma du Réel catalogue

Éric Baudelaire is an artist and filmmaker based in Paris, France. After training as a political scientist, Baudelaire established himself as a visual artist with a research-based practice in several media ranging from photography and the moving image to installation, performance, and letter writing. His work probes a reality shaped by the systems of representation that structure contemporary societies: political, judicial, economic and informational constructs. His feature films are shown in festivals as well as exhibitions, where they are presented within broader installations that include other works, archival documents and extensive public programmes. He is currently artist in residence at Atelier en Residence by Lafayette Anticipations, Paris.

When Rain Clouds Gather so far:

The film screening program When Rain Clouds Gather discusses artistic imaginaries for possible futures, contemplating social and environmental justice. The series presents an overview of artistic practices that address the different imaginaries and responses that shape how we envision a climatic and more just future. Inspired by the homonymous novel of Bessie Head, the novel is a tale of hope amidst despair, inspiring us to think of possible futures with care and determination, against the damning reality of climate catastrophe. 

The program began with the co-authored works of acclaimed philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva and artist Arjuna Neuman. In the past decade, the duo has been working on a film series entitled Elemental Cinema, consisting of four films, that will be screened for a period of one month at the Kunsthalle Bern.

Each film in the series Elemental Cinema is dedicated to one of the four elements. In it, the artists have developed an approach that takes matter, material, and the elemental as its starting point – aspects which continue to be neglected and suppressed by the globally dominant order of thinking and being. Ferreira da Silva and Neuman’s work undermines patterns of thinking about and relating to the Earth that have been shaped by European colonial modernity. They show that categories and distinctions that seem self-evident in the Global West underlie a profoundly unequal, racist world. Neuman and Ferreira da Silva‘s work experiments with thinking and sensing simultaneously the various moments of material existence: the quantic, cosmic, organic/mechanic, historic/geologic. It often departs from a particular site, but then moves through and weaves together various times and places to show the planetary scope and historical depth of pressing geopolitical issues.