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Films

It's About Time! Reflections on Urgency

2020 | 31.29 mins | Colour
By Mieke Bal​

Genre: Theoretical Fiction
Polish spoken, English Subtitles

During the first week of March 2020, one week before the corona lockdown, I went to Lódz, Poland, where the famous film school had been the recipient of a major research grant to examine what an “essay film” could be. The program’s director, Dr Jakub (Kuba) Mikurda, invited me to participate and come to make an essay film. Thanks to fabulous participants, I managed it, and here it is…

At first I didn’t quite know what I considered an essay film to be. But when I said so, Kuba, quick as a flash, replied: “but all your films are essy films!” This was such a wonderful moment of learning something about my own film work.

The film’s title is willfully ambiguous: the film is a “theoretical fiction” about time in history, around my concept of “pre-posterous history” that I had developed in my book on Caravaggio and contemporary art. But with exclamation mark also refers to the other meaning: it’s about time we do something about the world!

Here are some links:

Trailer
https://youtu.be/F0EB8OQY_Ow

Film
https://youtu.be/DK-5lbK4t5M

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