FILM IST. a girl & a gun

(…) If the first two sections of FILM IST. invoke (without being limited to) science pedagogy and the narrative of history respectively, the latest episode - bearing the sinister number 13 - probes the secret forces of cosmology, sexuality and the drive towards death. Its title, A girl & a gun, refers to a definition of cinema offered by D.W.Griffith, rediscovered by Jean Luc Godard. The phrase identifies sexuality and violence as driving impulses behind the manufacture of moving images. But more than this, the phrase also invokes cinema's fundamental affinity with the dynamic that psychoanalysis calls displacement, in which one thing stands in for another. In the movies sex is never simply sex and violence is rarely simply violence; indeed, one substitutes for the other. The gun exerts a phallic force, but sexual desire is also channeled into national fantasies of dominance and conquest. Movies not only combine sex and violence, but fuse the energy of one with the other. But FILM IST. episode 13 A girl & a gun goes beyond a critique of film's exploitation of sex and violence, and fashions an overarching mythology from images of these primal energies. The episode extends from genesis to apocalypse, exposing the forces underlying modern history and perhaps the cosmos as well. Simultaneously a myth and an anti-myth, episode 13 stages the battle of Thanatos and Eros, using the imagery of cinema to create a new epic form with found footage drawn from pornography, historical documentary, fictional dramas and images of nature. A girl & a gun blends these varied modes of filmmaking and their different temporalities in order to fashion a cinematic myth in which the full course of time and history unwinds within a eternal process of union and division.(...) (Tom Gunning, From Fossils of Time to a Cinematic Genesis)