This November, Spectacle is proud to present the first-ever U.S. survey of Danish-born experimental filmmaker and artist Jytte Rex.
While she is rightly regarded as a major living artist in Europe with a CV of important feminist artworks dating back to the 1970s and longstanding gallery representation, Rex’s films have never been available to see in the United States. In hopes of remedying this blind spot, Spectacle offers New Yorkers a first-ever chance to see her noted features ISOLDE (1989) and MIRRORS OF THE PLANET (1992, which played as a one-off at Spectacle in 2013) plus more recent works like THE RIVER (2003), SILK ROAD (2004), and the newly subtitled THE GIRL WITH THE PLAIT (2005), alongside her most recent video SEARCH – LIMBO (2022). Many of these have been scanned and/or subtitled under Rex’s supervision for the purposes of this series.
From her freewheeling dual adaptation of Borges in THE MEMORIOUS, the cosmically focused ghost-story MIRRORS OF THE PLANET to her updated retelling of classic tragedy in ISOLDE, Rex’s is a cinema that flirts with death. At once baroque and gothic while also clinical and exacting, her films invite audiences into the headspaces of characters who are near death, perhaps already taking their first steps into the afterlife or, likelier still, somewhere in between. Embracing mystery and eschewing narrative conventions, Rex’s work is imbued with a Tarkovskian sensibility, featuring quotidian video-diaries, unsettling found-footage, and private fears drawn from a lifetime of looking. Rex’s keen musical palette profoundly attunes the viewer’s attention in montages and tableaux equal parts impossible to describe and to forget.
The essence of the film (MIRRORS OF THE PLANET) can be expressed with Dante’s words:
In the middle of the path through life
I found myself in the pitch-darkness halls in a forest
Lost from the way that was given to me.
– Jytte Rex
Special thanks to Jytte Rex, the Danish Film Institute, Kong Gulerod Film and Wilson Saplana Gallery.
MIRRORS OF THE PLANET + THE MEMORIOUS
SUNDAY NOVEMBER 2 – 7:30PM
TUESDAY NOVEMBER 18 – 7:30PM
FRIDAY NOVEMBER 28 – 7:30PM
BUY TICKETS
MIRRORS OF THE PLANET
(PLANETENS SPELJE)
dir. Jytte Rex, 1992
75 min. Denmark.
In Danish with English subtitles.
Described by the filmmaker as “an endless phantasy about birth, time, language, love, nature, death”, MIRRORS OF THE PLANET is a probing battery of philosophical inquiries, with black holes and rock formations re-etched in the idiom of a dissolving (or not?) relationship between astronomer Adam Morgenstern (Ole Lemmeke) and his unnamed colleague (Cher Guetze). There is no scientific certainty to Morgenstern’s work; the infinite cosmos become mere projections of his individual fears and refracted half-memories. Aside from a bone-deep romantic earnestness, what makes MIRRORS OF THE PLANET one of a kind is Rex’s collaboration with cinematographer Manuel Sellner, writing a slow-morphing spectrum of spectacular locations and Borgesian fata morganas in long, mesmerizing Steadicam takes. Words don’t just fail MIRRORS OF THE PLANET; the movie renders them useless.
screening with
THE MEMORIOUS
(DEN ERINDRENDE)
dir. Jytte Rex, 1985
39 min. Denmark.
In Danish with English subtitles.
A Mayan sorcerer, imprisoned and tortured, seeks to harness the power of a jaguar to escape his fate, while a recently paralyzed boy discovers he possesses the uncanny ability to remember everything and anything. Drawing from two stories by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1942’s Funes the Memorious and 1949’s The Writing of the God), Rex entwines both narratives into a poetic meditation on memory and the human longing to transcend suffering.
ISOLDE
dir. Jytte Rex, 1989
92 min. Denmark.
In Danish with English subtitles.
SATURDAY NOVEMBER 8 – 5:00PM
WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 26 – 7:30PM
SUNDAY NOVEMBER 30 – 7:30PM
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Riffing on the classic tragedy of Tristan and Isolde, Rex takes what interests her and leaves what doesn’t, resituating the character of Isolde as a dissatisfied middle-aged spouse rediscovering her sexuality in 1980s Copenhagen. Rex’s omnivorous interest in literature, sculpture and dance means she takes what might have been a conventional “woman begins to mentally unravel” plotline and transforms it into a profoundly lyrical meditation on femininity, guilt and responsibility, as it’s revealed Isolde’s spurned husband has hired a young man to murder her. Rex’s use of achingly beautiful symmetry and ominously scored long camera takes anticipates the even more formally finessed MIRROR OF THE PLANETS that would come a few years later.
SILK ROAD
(SILKEVEJEN)
dir. Jytte Rex, 2004
75 min. Denmark.
In Danish with English subtitles.
FRIDAY NOVEMBER 14 – 5:00PM
MONDAY NOVEMBER 24 – 7:30PM
SATURDAY NOVEMBER 29 – 5:00PM
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One of Rex’s most celebrated and enigmatic 21st century films, SILK ROAD is preoccupied with the threshold between life and death. Christine, a renaissance-era painting restorer with a deep connection to the work of Sofonisba Anguissola, is seriously ill. Lying in a sterile hospital bed, drifting in and out of consciousness, a lifetime of memories jolts Christine through afterlife-adjacent visions, and confronts her with spectres of her past. In dialogue with her dead husband, and under the watchful eye of her father, Rex’s heroine flows through the in-between, and among images of biblical proportions.
screening with
SEARCH-LIMBO
dir. Jytte Rex, 2022
8 min. Denmark.
No dialogue.
THE RIVER + THE GIRL WITH THE PLAIT
SUNDAY NOVEMBER 9 – 5:00PM
TUESDAY NOVEMBER 25 – 7:30PM
FRIDAY NOVEMBER 28 – 5:00PM
BUY TICKETS
THE RIVER
(FLODEN)
dir. Jytte Rex, 2003
23 min. Denmark.
In Danish with English subtitles.
Making free use of voiceover narration and overlaid images, Rex turns the travelogue format inside out in THE RIVER, which teases out and taxonomizes various potential meanings of the titular “river image” (as described by Rex.) There are cracks to blind areas of loss and oblivion, world fires and floods – and to an oasis of dreams, fantasies and myths. As in all of Rex’s work (whether moving-image based or otherwise), images materialize in the borderlands between mind and world.
screening with
THE GIRL WITH THE PLAIT
(PIGEN NED FLETNINGEN)
dir. Jytte Rex, 2005
40 min. Denmark.
In Danish with English subtitles.
THE GIRL WITH THE PLAIT is a memory film about Copenhagen, in which a six-year-old girl — the director’s alter ego — revisits some of the magical places of her childhood and speaks with the people she meets along the way.
JYTTE REX is an accomplished Danish artist, writer and film director. Rex studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in the early 70ties and was at the forefront of the Scandinavian feminist arts movement. Throughout her extensive career she has worked with various media, performances, videowork, sculptures and photography. Often her images appear in multiple collages and settings, changing their narrative and agency. Jytte Rex has a unique position in Danish film, literature, and art history. Her works are avant-garde and poetic with stories often carried by a feminist commitment. For decades she focused on her international career as a film director, receiving both the Eckersbergs Medal and the same year the Danish Arts Foundation’s lifetime honor. She received the Skovgaard Medal in 2004 and the Thorvaldsen Medal in 2005. In recent decades museums around the world have rediscovered her great feminist artistic practice and her works are represented in the collections of The National Gallery of Denmark, Aros – Museum of Contemporary Art, KUNSTEN – Museum of Modern Art Aalborg, Ny Carlsbergfondet, Vejle Art Museum, Art Museum Brandts, the National Photography Museum.
