GOING VISUAL! III

Daft Punk, Kanye West, Animal Collective, Sufjan Stevens, DJ Spooky, The Chemical Brothers and RZA are just some of the artists who, to varying degrees and through various media, have been involved in the audio-visual world. The uneven relationship between music and film guides the series of events at GOING VISUAL!, organised by Red Bull and developed in 2013, at the Nave de Música in Matadero Madrid.   Everyone agrees that we multitask when watching TV while updating our social networking profiles, but it seems almost unbelievable to us that artists can break out of the boxes we have pigeonholed them, either once in while or in a way that runs parallel through their life and work as well as the ability to enter into other disciplines: filmmakers that write books, actors that paint, or as is in the case at hand, musicians that start rolling the camera and yelling action! Going Visual! Takes a look at the work of a handful of contemporary musicians that have decided to try their luck as filmmakers, and/or that have worked very closely in creating visual universes to go alongside their songs, such as Animal Collective, Sufjan Stevens, DJ Spooky, Mr. Oizo, Daft Punk, Kanye West and RZA, to mention only a few.   In a world that is becoming evermore audio-visual, and where digital technology has democratized all artistic practices, music and image have become two sides of the same coin, and the connections, exchanges and synthesis between both disciplines are increasingly communal, on top of becoming more apparent. More than just a whim, or childish playing around with cameras, the musicians in this series of events demonstrate that their incursions into the audio-visual world aren’t just the results of boredom, but rather authentic works that compliment, expand, intensify, and possibly even contradict their music. Whether this is due to their lack of training in film, as in some cases, or because of their contempt for the industries rules and tics, these works are surprising in their amount of risk and experimentation and result in something difficult to find in more conventional cinema.   PROGRAM FOR JUNE:   Wednesday 5th June, 21h. Free Entry Wrong Quentin Dupieux. France, USA, 2012. 94´.   If the name Quentin Dupieux doesn’t ring any bells then try saying Mr. Oizo, the pseudonym under which the Frenchmen became known, in the nineties, as an electronic musician with an interest in visuals. His track “Flat Beat”, with its frenzied beat, reached its success through its unique video as much as through its music. The video starred the moody yellow puppet Flat Eric. This puppet, which later went on to appear in famous ads for jeans, was actually a version of a previously made puppet, also created by Dupieux, with the much more French name of Stéphane, and  had already been in short films made by the musician and creator. He almost completely disappeared from the music scene, but Dupieux made a surprising comeback in 2010 at the Cannes Film Festival, with a film of equal craziness and brilliance: Rubber, the story of a murderous tyre, in which he demonstrated that underneath the musician and publicist we find first and foremost a filmmaker. Wrong, his third feature length film, released at the Toronto Film Festival, continues with the same sense of humour, which is somewhere between existentialism, and the absurd an international version of the post-humour chantant: an icy smile, a constant feeling of discomfort, a playful disturbance revealing that, at the very least, Dupieux is a the master of his own universe, full of pop culture references, passed through a filter of irony and discontent.   Thursday 27^th June, 21h. Free Entry The Man with the Iron Fists RZA. USA, Hong Kong, 2012. 95’   That the former leader of the Wu-Tang Clan, RZA, debuted as an actor in a movie like Ghost Dog (1999), where the always fantastic Jim Jarmusch rightly mixed together Afro-American genealogy with the beat of Rap music and the rigid morality of the Samurai might not be just a coincidence. Not surprisingly his first feature film has had a new rereading in relation to the violent origins of the black community in the United States… a clearly postmodern and Tarantinoesque coding: relocating the situation in the southern United States to nineteenth century China, RZA and the producer Quentin Tarantino, make a audio-visual mash-up which combines an excessive, out of control homage to martial arts films with hip-hop as a vehicle for operatic grandiosity and tremendous fun. We don’t know if its because of RZA’s expertise, or the high end Asian team, all trained in the best of martial arts cinema, The Man with the Iron Fists, which went unseen on Spanish screens, is authentically luxurious, overflowing with well filmed fights, and pure visual enjoyment.