Led by Montserrat Albores and Pablo Sigg

Goddamned Films 1 and 2 were two events that were carried out in Petra and conceived as a reflection on the Deleuzian notion of film as resistance.

Goddamned Films 1 consisted of a ten-hour-long film cycle with a series of works whose only point in common was the problem of cinematic space as a limit: from La chambre (1972) by Chantal Akerman, in which the camera becomes a prisoner of the space it records—and not vice versa—through a ten-minutelong circular shot of Akerman’s room, to Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, in which the film’s characters are the absurd prisoners of a space without limits, to Andy Warhol’s Screentests, whose only condition was to record not a face (in that sense they are not portraits, as Warhol himself thought) but rather the space occupied by a face. All this seemed to us to illustrate an aspect of Deleuze’s reflection: certain films, Gilles Deleuze explains, deliberately limit their own space in order to deterritorialize the world. That is, cinema is only possible insofar as it delineates its spaces, insofar as it splits itself off from the world.

Goddamned Films 2 was a private event with approximately twenty-five invited participants. It began with the projection of the conference Qu’est-ce que l’acte de création? in its entirety, held on March 17, 1987, by Gilles Deleuze in the FEMIS. The project consisted of generating a single question at the end of the projection: what is implied by speaking of film as resistance, in a Deleuzian as well as a non-Deleuzian sense? Among the participants were Jenny Sorkin, Tom McDonough, John Mennick, Martha Rosler and Francis Alÿs. Following the discussion, after a shot of mezcal and with a Nirvana record playing in the background, Martha Rosler said: “Petra is one of the strangest things; something some of us lived and thought at the end of the 60s, something deeply domestic—that and something else that I can’t define…”