Towards the overflow : poetics & politics of liquids

From the contemplation of the movement of fluids to their gushing, a poetics of circulation, of overflow as a political gesture of disobedience. From the riverbed to the bed of the lovers, a navigation evoking the questions of the control of the bodies, of the emancipation by the splash, and the stakes of the existence of a filmic matter which would escape from the channels which are usually reserved to him.

This program of the Marseille Underground Film & Music Festival (MUFF) is a kind of navigation: we walk through the films, we evoke in turn the questions of control - in particular of biological and social bodies - the possibility of an emancipation by the exploration and the construction of new territories resulting from the splash, from the overflow, and the stakes of the existence of a filmic matter which would escape from the channels which are usually reserved for it.

We will meet women and/or queer filmmakers whose chosen works all approach this idea of “liquid”, with their own language and their own intentions, ranging from a walk along a river to the use of menstrual blood on film, through curious pornographic representations.

Flows, secretions, circulations and physiological or geological outpourings could be seen here as an evocation of ecofeminisms and/or a will to inscribe in a “feminist memory”. But they will also be the refusal of a retention - symbolic and literal, of these fluids, of these threatening flows - imposed to the not normalized, not dominant bodies and sexualities.

They will constitute the raw material, organic, and generative of a work. Substances in freedom are superimposed and accumulate to create new aesthetic, social, political paradigms, to form landscapes, in mutation, to invent new mythologies, spiritualities or utopias… Through the instability and unpredictability of the liquid movement, the secretory process - whose procreative dimension is evacuated - and the artistic process - therefore kinetic / cinematographic - are mirrored, not without referring to this cinema of the margins which animates the Marseille Underground Film & Music Festival (MUFF) since its beginnings, in what it represents of experimentation and possible overflow of a framework which in other places norms and governs it.

From the theory of the humours to the subjection of the (assigned) “feminine” bodies, which one assimilates to a systematic risk of overflow, of flows considered as loss, it is question here to assume the overflow in all these meanings - to spread beyond its ordinary bed, out of its container, tocross the opposite defense, to be pushed further than one would like ^* - to be able to then generate it and to consider it like emancipatory gesture. It is an attempt to escape, to revolt, and we want to see this “escape” not as a failure but as a gain, a possibility that would tend towards new forms, different practices, alternatives or a tool to fight together against the dominant proposal.

So… open the floodgates!

—

Ana Servo for MUFF

Born in 2016, the MUFF (Marseille Underground Film & Music Festival) brings together various enthusiasts, actors and actresses from the local and national underground film and music scene around a common desire: to create an innovative, polymorphous film and music festival in Marseille by offering screenings, concerts, performances, and participatory workshops.