Close Up

7 December 2019: Don't Count on Your Fingers

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"Defeated… but not vanquished"

For this informal launch, join the Liberated Film Club's curator Winstanley Schtinter to discuss Portabella's work, as he presents a specially recorded presentation by Portabella as an overview of his filmmaking, and on the significance of the London retrospective today. This will also act as an opportunity to collect one of the limited risograph printed programmes covering the whole four months of the season, and see for free the very rarely screened Don’t Count on Your Fingers, Portabella's directorial debut. An incredibly timely retrospective, this is a study of a historical and current cinema by the radical Catalan Portabella, which occupies a role beyond urgency in our current milieu.

A presentation by Pere Portabella
Pere Portabella, 2019, 50 min (looped)

No compteu amb els dits
Pere Portabella, 1967, 28 min
Spanish with English subtitles

Returning from an exile imposed by his production credit on Luis Bunuel’s Viridiana; the first sentence of the film, Portabella’s directorial debut, is "Defeated… but not vanquished" the final sequence: a gift to the spectator in a blank screen. With the participation of poet Joan Brossa, this is Portabella’s maiden ripping of the rulebook: an attempt to liberate from stasis and dogma the language of cinema.


Part of the Liberated Film Club's retrospective on Pere Portabella

"A Worm’s Tail View is Often the True One: Films by Pere Portabella", curated and produced by the Liberated Film Club, is the most complete, ambitious and creative survey of the radical Catalan filmmaker Portabella's work ever to have taken place. Close-Up is proud to act as headquarters and locus for this London-wide survey, taking place over four months at venues including ICA, Whitechapel Gallery, Cafe Oto and the University of Cambridge.

With thanks to the kind support of Institut Ramon Llull and Films 59.

More info: purge.xxx


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