Held weekly at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, RVFC is a student-run film screening initiative interested in inviting and platforming the programming of curated film nights by any and all. 

 

December 2025 screenings:

 

Hello everyone, we'll be hosting a single week of screenings on the first week of December, after that, we reserve time and space for those who have assessments and for a break. We will be back on the 5th of January with weekly programming as usual!

 

Hereby the two very special screenings taking place on the 3rd and 4th of December.

 

 

 

 

Wednesday, December 3rd, 17:00 at the Rietveld action stairs.

Weather Diaries, Part 01-06, (1986-1990) with an introductory essay by travis jeppesen.

George Kuchar.

Hosted by Inka.

 

The first cinema was a cinema of attractions1. Contrary to the conventional belief that

moving images developed as a logical consequence of a narrative impulse inadequately

satisfied by still images, the history of moving images is actually more closely connected to

a modernization (meaning rationalization) of Western sciences and the accompanying

measurements of humans and initial explorations of human psychology. The insights

derived from this, or rather assumptions, about the human perceptual apparatus, made the

concept of moving images possible in the first place: Only through the discovery of the

persistence of vision is it conceivable, for example, that image sequences appear to us as

an uninterrupted visual unity (24fps baby).2 The first cinematic machines and moments

consequently focus, given their context, on forms of voyeurism that differ from the

psychological voyeurism familiar to us today. Their focus was not storytelling, but

exhibiting, a spectacular exploitation of new technical possibilities for exhibitionist

revelation. It is therefore hardly surprising that the first film productions were based either

on medium-inherent technical tricks and gimmicks (e.g., staging magic shows using editing

techniques), newly imaginable forms of representation (e.g., zoom movements or extreme

close-ups) and/or erotic situations. Only some years later does cinema become

narrativized and its exhibitionist character shifts to the psychological: What is spectacular

is no longer the revelation of the non-visible, but the presentation/narration of the non-

experienceable/knowable. Although forms of this cinema of attractions continue to persist

in the mass form of narrative cinema (through editing techniques, special effects, setting,

etc.), its radical potential for attention formation and world mediation is displaced into

avant-garde productions.3

George Kuchar's video series "Weather Diaries" exists at an intersection of various

cinematic forms and modes. It is neither pure spectacle (cinema) nor simulation

(television), but employs elements of all forms while explicitly returning to the exhibitionist

origins of moving images. Equipped with an early model of the digital camcorder for home

use, Kuchar films himself over decades engaging in behavior he himself dubbed “Storm-

Squatting". For decades, Kuchar travels during his spring breaks from his teaching position

at the San Francisco Art Institute to the nowhere place of San Remo in Oklahoma to

observe extreme weather, particularly tornadoes. In doing so, he documents himself and

his environment. About the resulting works, Travis Jeppesen writes in his essay "The

Pervert's Diary": "The work is neither home movie nor high art, but perhaps a little of both,

and it forms a self-portrait of the artist—his journeys, his friends, and his daily motions—all

transmitted through Kuchar's self-deprecating, Bronx-accented narration. The Kuchar

oeuvre is an archaeology of the mundane."

The "Weather Diaries" are exhibitionist in the sense that they replace conventional

narration in favor of a localization and visualization of the body in space. The centering of

the body here transgresses boundaries of the socius, of social (and legislative) law: This

transgression of the showable and sayable is also exhibitionist.4 "Kuchar is an

automaticist," writes Jeppesen, “(…) rooted in the awareness that creation is not merely a

process, but a physical, bodily one, as well. (...) the principle of extension rules: wherein

mind is an extension of the body and vice versa." Jeppesen describes this self-

understanding as a Body-Mind-Vehicle, an anti-static machine, programmed according to

its own law. Any externalization of this machine is therefore to be classified as exhaust:

whether art object or literally excrement. The suspension of this distinction is exemplarily

demonstrated by Kuchar in his series: what is to be seen is the exhaust of his stays in

Tornado Alley. "I've always believed in looking in the garbage for inspiration," says Kuchar

in a 2005 interview.5 Margaret Morse writes about the series: "The tape ultimatelyaddresses all the big questions—death, origin and family, religion—as well as the small

discomforts of the body, only to reverse their order of importance."

Together we will watch all parts of the series: This includes "Wild Night in El Reno" and

"Weather Diaries 1-6." The total length thus exceeds 5 hours, but is meant to be an offer to

experience these challenging and hard to digest (ha ha) works together. During the

screening, people can freely come and go. To begin, we will also read an excerpt from

Jeppesen's essay "The Pervert's Diary."

 

Snacks and drinks are available.

 

1) "Rather than being an involvement with narrative action or empathy with character psychology, the cinema of

attractions is a cinema that displays its visibility, willing to rupture a self-enclosed fictional world for a chance to solicit the

attention of the spectator. [...] The cinema of attractions directly addresses the spectator, acknowledging his presence,

and seeking to incite and satisfy his curiosity through an act of exhibitionist display.” (From: Gunning, Tom. "The Cinema of

Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde." In Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, edited by Thomas Elsaesser and

Adam Barker, 56–62. London: British Film Institute, 1990)

2) See: Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge,

MA: MIT Press, 1990.

3) "It is in the avant-garde that the cinema of attractions truly survives—not as a weak echo of a past era, but as a

counter-current to the dominant narrative cinema. From Léger to the present-day experimental film, the avant-garde

practice has aimed to re-activate the shock, the sensation, and the direct visual confrontation that narrative cinema

sought to domesticate.” (From: Gunning, Tom. "The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde." In Early

Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, edited by Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker, 56–62. London: British Film Institute, 1990)

4) "The abject is what does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. [...] It is

thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not

respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite." (From: Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror:

An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982, p. 4.)

5) Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois translate the concept of the "formless" developed by George Bataille into art

theory: The formless is not merely the opposite of form, but rather an active process, a "dirty work" that aims to bring

down the categories themselves. It designates that which declassifies philosophical and aesthetic oppositions by

undermining the basic operations of idealism.

"It tells us that formless is not a theme, not a substance, not a concept that can be circumscribed. It is an operation: the

active undoing of the category.”(From: Krauss, Rosalind E., and Yve-Alain Bois. Formless: A User's Guide. New York: Zone Books,

1997, p. 27)

 

 

 

 

Thursday, December 4th, 18:00 at the Rietveld action stairs.

To kill a war machine, (2025) + Soup + Panel Talk and Q&A

Hannah Majid.

Hosted by gra.si.students4palestine.

 

Together with @rietveldfilmclub we are organizing a film screening of the documentary To Kill A Warmachine (2025) followed up with a panel talk by several activists from The Netherlands. We will also serve soup & drinks.

 

Through real-time bodycam and phone footage, frontline activists take audiences along on their audacious raids to tear down arms factories across the UK. Since 2020, the direct-action group Palestine Action has documented its operations to dismantle companies and infrastructure supplying weapons to the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

 

This year, Palestine Action was proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the UK government. As a result, the film’s UK theatrical release was blocked and the directors removed the online version. It is currently forbidden to screen this film or to support Palestine Action in the UK.

 

17:00 soup, drinks and fundraiser 

18:00 start film

19:15 panel talk and Q&A

 

 

See you back in January with weekly programming as usual!

RVFC.

 

🎈🍎 Open Call for curation of film screenings for February & onwards! Please reach out to the Filmclub through their instagram (@rietveldfilmclub), email (filmclubrietveld@gmail.com) or in person if you want to show a film(s) you like and host a night together with RVFC.

 

RVFC graphics by @theagencyservices.