On 8 of September, Thursday, at 7 pm., at Romuva cinema (Laisvės av. 54) will be presenting the only one show of the movie “The Man Who Saw Too Much” by director Trisha Ziff, Mexico in Lithuania. Just for adults. Tickets are available at Romuva cinema and at www.tiketa.lt
A film about fragility; a man obsessed with photographing the accident who discovered that the fate of others was his way of connecting to life. What happens when the image of the accident becomes the object of desire? Through the work of Metinides and his contemporaries we discover Mexico City through a narrative of crime scenes and accidents; and confront our own fascination with death, morbidity, rubbernecking through the Metinides Gaze.
FILMOGRAPHY:
Trisha Ziff’s film credits include; Oaxacalifornia; (US/UK -1995), producer; Chevolution 2008 made for Netflix her opera prima for Red Envelope director; a film which immerged from her curatorial work on the image of Che Guevara and book. In 2011 she directed, The Mexican Suitcase a Mexican/Spanish coproduction. Producer/ director of The Man Who Saw Too Much (2015). Trisha completed, Pirate Copy; Pirate Stories, three shorts, a road trip through the world of film piracy in 2014 filmed in London, Palestine, Dubai and Mexico City and is currently working on the feature Rambo to Tarkovsky. Projects in development are Witkin & Witkin a dialogue on perception looking at the work of identical twins, photographer Joel Peter and his brother, Jerome. Return To Oaxacalifornia, a look at the Mejia family twenty one years after the first film, with Seamus McGarvey. A film about generations and identity and being Mexican in America.
Trisha teaches film and media studies and guest lectures at universities in the U.S. Mexico and Europe.
On 9 of September, Friday, at 6 pm., at Kaunas district museum, Raudondvaris castle (Pilies path 1, Raudondvaris) will be the opening of the exhibition “The Man Who Saw Too Much” by Enrique Metinides (Mexico city). Curator of the exhibition Thrisha Ziff.
Enrique Metinides was born in 1934 in Mexico City. As a small child, he began photographing and collecting pictures of accidents and car wrecks. With no formal education, his interest in photography grew from his passion for gangster movies of the forties and film-noir.
While covering a story he would recall scenes from the movies and work to recreate similar scenarios in a real world. He achieved a unique photographic style, often working from a high vantage point or using a wide-angle lens in order to capture an entire event in a single frame. Often his images included the spectators as well as the accident. Metinides is a consummate storyteller, his photographs elegantly composed and far less graphic than those published in today’s tabloids.
Looking at his photographs, we see how daily life in Mexico City changed from the 1940’s to the 1980’s, the population, the type of accidents, and the dramas of a growing megalopolis.
Not satisfied in only taking pictures; the Red Cross was part of Metinides world, often he would put down his camera to assist the injured and his colleagues. He invented the code system that is still used by emergency workers throughout Mexico today.
For over fifty years, Metinides work was published in La Prensa, Zocalo, Crimen and Alarma, yet rarely were his photographs published outside Mexico. It is only in recent years that his images have been seen internationally, but in museums and galleries, not newspapers, from France, Germany, the United States, Holland, Spain, England, and Poland, with books published in three languages as well as a feature documentary completed in 2015.
Now retired from the street, Metinides continues to photograph, creating fictional accidents combining old photographs with toys from his collection. Every morning he buys newspapers and uses them to create albums of both local and international news. The man who saw too much and yet at eighty-two a man who still, today cannot stop looking!
“I published my first photograph when I was 11 years old in La Prensa It’s how I got my name, “El Niño”. I used a Brownie Junior box camera, I had no formal photo-education at all. I learnt on the street from other photographers who I worked with. I think the biggest influence on my work has always been American movies, especially early gangster movies. The street where we lived, San Juan de Letrán had a lot of cinemas. As a boy I would go and sit close to the screen and take photos of the movies. Later, when I was photographing an accident I sometimes wondered if I was here in the city or I had entered the screen in one of those films.
I have seen everything, bus crashes, plane crashes, car crashes, cars with buses, cars and trains, bicycle accidents and ambulance accidents. I have been at the crime scenes of murders, crimes of passion, assassinations and robberies. I have seen shootings, hangings and stabbings. I have seen fires and explosions and all kinds of disasters, man made and natural. In the movies, whenever there was a shooting or an accident the scene would be filled with extras looking on. So I copied that in my photographs, People love to watch, it’s both curiosity and entertainment. People enjoy spectacle, gossip and drama! That’s why action movies are so popular! Even today, a good accident, brings out the people… This is what sells newspapers and it is why people enjoy looking at my photographs “
Enrique Metinides, 2016
The exhibition will be on display until 2 of October.
Working hours: I – II closed, III – VII 10 am. – 6 pm.