Seminar Dock Of The Bay
“Narratives of the Real”
KM Kulturunea, 12th January 2017
This seminar, organised by the Dock of the Bay Festival in cooperation with the Gipuzkoa provincial authority's department of culture, Koldo Mitxelena Kulturunea and Fomento de San Sebastián, sets out to discuss the narratives of music documentary film. At this year's edition, discussion will focus on how the action of documenting, narrating and expressing opinions, as well as that of programming, always involve a critical positioning regarding this film genre and regarding the narratives and languages that gain visibility and value through it.
To take part, send an email to info@dockofthebay.es with a brief explanation of your reasons for attending. Registration is free.
16:30 h.
SERGE GAINSBOURG vs. PAUL DELVAUX vs. JEAN-CHRISTOPHE AVERTY: THE STORY OF MELODY NELSON
Felipe Cabrerizo (More info)
In 1974 Serge Gainsbourg published his concept album Histoire de Melody Nelson. Aware that with this album he had taken a step forward in the development of chanson, Gainsbourg decided to make a whole film about his work in cooperation with the painter Paul Delvaux and the avant-garde film-maker Jean-Christophe Averty. The result was to be one of the most brilliant audiovisual pieces in the history of pop and a new way of visually presenting musical work that was never to be explored further.
17:15 h.
Film Programming: Ten Rules
Alejandro Díaz (More info)
Without aiming to pontificate, the talk offers a succinct basic manual of appropriate methods and practices in programming films at international festivals - at least as the author sees them - in ten basic axioms (supplemented by various digressions, observations and advice).
18:00 h.
TELEVISION IS NUTRITIOUS
Kikol Grau (More info)
People who work to make television are subject to other people's decisions. I'm recycled: before, I made television programmes, but now I make televisual experiments outside television. They don't want me on the telly any more - they don't give me work, and I won't work for them again. The way everything works has changed, and I'm not needed any more. For many years I was able to make lots of things for TV and live from my programmes, all of them related to culture and music, and today I find that amazing. This means I see my own work as an oddity on the Spanish television scene.
18:45 h.
DOES IT REALLY MATTER? INFLATED RHETORIC IN MUSIC DOCUMENTARIES
Joan Pons (More info)
Emotional blackmail, idealisation of content, mythification of small print, absence of critical voices. Music documentaries often use a range of devices in their narrative language to make us believe that the protagonists being discussed are more important than they really are. Biased focus and fan rhetoric come before historical and/or journalistic rigour.
19:30 h.
THE BOWIE-IMAGE (OR THE MUSIC DOCUMENTARY AS AN ACT OF SIMULATION)
Aaron Rodríguez (More info)
Nearly all scholars of pop culture coincide in locating the historical appearance of David Bowie as the key point in the negation of the concept of "authenticity" as a parameter in conceiving the world. As opposed to the social, ideological - or simply existential - commitment of previous stars, Bowie brought concepts like frivolity, simulation or masquerade to the debate as standpoints announcing and celebrating a much-vaunted "postmodernity". Hence the collection of images that punctuated his career - in particular the documentary pieces made by figures as diverse as Pennebacker, Alan Yentob or Francis Whately - can be seen as an immense mechanism for self-creation in which the lines running between documentaries, live performances and film roles are a frontal attack on the "rule of the real". A comparison will be made between the conventions and customs of the music documentary inherited from the realist waves of the seventies (thanks especially to creative talents like Michael Lindsay-Hogg or Godard) to see how Bowie was the starting point to move on from this, leading to new languages closer to those of video performance or art installation.
