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Some Chance Operations

Renée Green

1999 00:36:00 Austria, Italy, United StatesEnglishColorStereo4:3Film
Tags:
Art History, Artist Portraits, City, European Film/Video, Expedition/Travel, Experimental Film, Memory, Mental Landscape, Travel

Description

Shot in Naples, Vienna, and New York, Some Chance Operations explores the notion of an archival form, in this instance film, as an unstable memory receptacle that can vanish. History and how it is made is meditated upon as one of many chance operations. The filmmaker Elvira Notari, who had a film production company in Naples from 1906 to 1930, plays a significant role as an impetus for Some Chance Operations. Despite the fact that she was a prolific filmmaker, producing over sixty feature films, only three remain intact.

Notari’s films enjoyed a high level of popularity in Naples and circulated throughout Italy and in New York, where they were exported to fulfill the demand by Italian immigrants far away from their natal homes. Whether or not anyone remembers these films today is one of the questions posed in this film. How do people imagine what seems distant, both in time and location? The aspects of dreaming, fiction and projection involved in imagining even what was once familiar and how these memories are bound to words, sounds, sensations, and images become one of the themes of the film. The idea of Naples, for a variety of people, became a rallying point for this meditation.

About Renée Green

Renée Green is an artist, writer, and filmmaker known for her highly layered and formally complex multimedia installations in which ideas, perception, and experience are examined from myriad perspectives.

Via films, essays and writings, installations, digital media, architecture, sound-related works, film series and events, her work engages with explorations into circuits of relation and exchange over time, the gaps and shifts in what survives in public and private memories, as well as what has been imagined and invented.

Her exhibitions, videos and films have been seen throughout the world in museums and art institutions, biennials and festivals. A selection of these would include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona; Vienna Secession; as well as in Documenta, the Whitney Biennial, and the Venice Biennale.

Ongoing Becomings, a retrospective exhibition of 20 years of her work, was organized in 2009 by the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne. In 2010 the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, organized Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams, a survey exhibition highlighting her time-based work. In addition, her filmic work has been featured in the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, in Arsenal, Institut für Film und Videokunst, Berlin, and in the Cinemateca Portuguesa, Museu do Cinema, Lisbon. In 2008 La rêve de l’artiste et du spectateur, a retrospective of Green’s films, took place at the Jeu de Paume, in Paris.

A prolific writer, a selection of Green’s scripts has been collected in her books Other Planes of There: Selected Writings (Duke University Press, 2014), Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams (Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2010), and Shadows and Signals (Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2000).