Week 47/2026

Art Cinema OFFOff is screening three films by the German avant-garde filmmaker Werner Nekes that treat the film strip as a landscape. In Spacecut, a single stretch of canyon is assembled from long takes and fleeting single frames. The eye pieces the place together through a succession of impressions rather than description. Makimono, named after the Japanese scroll painting, unfolds its blurred blues, greens and greys through dissolves, double exposures and long pans. Photophthalmia, dedicated to Joseph Plateau and inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, travels into light until only a white screen remains. In all three, seeing is not a given but something the films construct and undo before our eyes.

Ida Lupino’s The Bigamist (1953), screening at RITCS Cinema, is a different kind of doubling. Edmond O’Brien plays Harry Graham, a travelling salesman who keeps two households, one in San Francisco, the other in Los Angeles, until an adoption agency investigator begins to look more closely. Produced by Lupino’s own independent company, the film refuses an easy villain. It is a melodrama of overlapping exposures about a self that cannot be contained within a single reel.

Bozar pays homage to the Irish filmmaker Vivienne Dick with four programmes. In Liberty’s Booty, women speak about sex work and the men who pay for it, while staged scenes blur the distinction between performance and everyday life. The film is made from within a community rather than from above it. Guerillère Talks captures No Wave figures such as Lydia Lunch and Ikue Mori with a Super 8 camera that moves as restlessly as its subjects. The question keeps returning: who controls the image, who is being watched, and what happens when a self is doubled, staged or exposed to too much light?