The Night of the Body
The ten-hour film marathon, with short lectures by Stelarc (AUS) and Orlan (FR), was part of the 5th Manifestation for the Unstable Media (The Body in Ruin).
The Night of the Body; photo: Jan Sprij
The Night of the Body was a ten-hour film marathon centered around the body in film. The variety of film was echoed in this evening, where underground movies, art movies, films by artists, medical films, scientific films and video cassettes show the many ways a camera may register the body. Apart from being made for a variety of reasons, these films span the several decades of film making, thus illustrating the changing ways the body is looked at. The films were screened in groups, in order to facilitate a dialogue. On this film night, the body was not viewed as a biological unity, but as a disputable social area where there is constant friction and into which technology slowly penetrates. The film night showed fears, dreams, ideals and emotions concerning, on one hand, the body itself and on the other hand a world where the body fuses, slowly but surely, with the machine. In this series of films, V2_ not only portrayed the spectacular, explosive, violent and fantastic technological body, but a range of ideas and fantasies about the body embedded in a rapidly changing society. Apart from the films, artists such as Stelarc (AUS) and Orlan (FR) delivered short lectures in which they illustrated, with videos, experiments upon their own bodies.
The 'Night of the Body' was organized in cooperation with film theatre Jeroen from 's Hertogenbosch and the Dutch film magazine Skrien.
