The "Burden of Dreams": The Intimacy of Political Cinema

Taking its cue from Les Blank's 1982 film, Burden of Dreams, Cimatheque's programming for the Spring season hopes to explore the oft-repeated slogan: "the personal is political", and the layers of meaning it entails. Particularly when it comes to making intensely intimate films, produced and presented to the public at enormous risk, be it financial or personal. Laying oneself bare for the camera's gaze to glimpse flaws, capturing moments or though processes that perhaps will not curry favor with everyone, is a frightening thing. This is especially true of cinema that takes political events, and filters them through an increasing y subjective lens revealing that the truth and facts can oftentimes possess different meanings.

There has long been an inherent tension from artists point of view in bringing the political onscreen for various, complex reasons without imbuing the work with a private element, or lived experience, for fear that the end result would somehow lack substance. Therefore, the lines between what is commonly understood to be "political cinema" film essays, first- person documentaries, experimental film, or autobiographical / personal narrative filmmaking are often blurred. However, what these different genres or "sub-genres" share is an attempt to investigate the weight of collective personal histories, and the vulnerability entailed in such an endeavor.

Perhaps not so coincidentally, this program's loose timeline features films made from the 1960s onwards, when the adage "the personal is political" first came into popular use. Beginning with Ziad Kalthoum's Taste of Cement (2017), the films featured here attempt to expand in some ways upon the groundwork left by filmmakers such as Chris Marker, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jonas Mekas. and Agnes Varda, amongst many others, and the remarkable headway made in this particular type of personal, essayistic cinema. Featuring films from the region and beyond, with an amalgam of genres-such as Yousry Nasrallah's rollicking Mercedes (1993), Yvonne Rainers challenging, brutal, and hilarious Privilege (1990) and the intensely personal Losing Ground (1982) from Kathleen Collins -the program looks to unpack the definitions ascribed to certain modes of filmmaking, and the ways in which the subjective and objective can become increasingly blurred.

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