Autoportrait and more

Autoportrait

1971/2012. Lebanon/France. Directed by Simone Fattal. In 1971, artist Simone Fattal visited a Museum of Modern Art exhibition of artists’ self-portraits that included all mediums save video. So, upon returning home to Beirut, she decided to make a video self-portrait. At first the camera stands in for the canvas or sketch paper, but the filmed portrait gradually captures the artist revealing herself, unraveling over time—by turns nervous, playful, introspective, inquisitive, disarmingly unrehearsed, and evocatively intimate. Ultimately the camera becomes a mirror, reflecting both the artist’s enactment of a portrait and our gaze, discovering, staring. In French; English subtitles. 46 min.

Fictions

1997. Morocco/France. Directed by Touda Bouanani. This video comprises three fictional tales of women's lives. In the first, Yasmine, a chambermaid, depicts her own imaginary world, drawing inspiration from a book of poems by Ahmed Bouanani, the director’s father. The second features a fortune teller who narrates her story using the ronda, a Moroccan-Spanish card game. The third is inspired by the travel chronicles of Isabelle Eberhardt and by Taos Amrouche’s rendition of The Song of Exile. In Arabic; English subtitles. 11 min.

Tale of the Umpteenth Night

1993. Morocco/France. Directed by Touda Bouanani. This video self-portrait draws inspiration from the storytelling tradition of A Thousand and One Nights, in which extraordinary characters become commonplace, and Georges Pérec’s infamous book Je me souviens (I Remember), which collected the remembrances of an entire generation in France. The artist’s voice emerges to claim its autonomy amid a social realm in which the collective supersedes the individual. In Arabic; English subtitles. 4 min.