Rietveld Filmclub November Programme

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.

 

November 2025 screenings:

 

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

Weather Diaries, Part 01-06, (1986-1990)

George Kuchar.

Hosted by Inka, with an introductory essay by travis jeppesen.

 

The first cinema was a cinema of attractions. 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). 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.

 

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 ultimately addresses 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.

 

 

 

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

 

 

See you in January!

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.