Screening
Eric Baudelaire: Also Known as Jihadi
France 2017, DCP, colour, sound, 99 min, French with English subtitles
Sudnay, January 28 2018, 8 pm, Lichthalle
On the occasion of his visit to Städelschule, French artist Eric Baudelaire will screen his new film Also Known As Jihadi and will discuss his recent exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which was conceived around the film. The screening is on Sunday, Jan 28, 8 pm in the Lichthalle and the lecture is on the following evening of Monday, Jan 30, 7pm.
Produced in the wake of the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, the film traces the journey and trial of a young man from the suburbs of Paris who travelled via Egypt to Syria to join the Al-Nusra Front (al-Qaeda). The subject’s path to radicalism is explored both through judicial transcripts and through a series of landscape shots filmed at the locations traversed by the subject: a biography determined not by what the subject did, but by what the subject saw. In this way, Baudelaire’s film positions itself as both a remake and a test of the landscape theory proposed by Japanese filmmaker Masao Adachi in his 1969 masterpiece A.K.A. Serial Killer, questioning how these landscapes reflect the social and political structures that form the backdrop for this journey of alienation and return.