Full 25 FPS Festival Line-Up: Kino 23, Expanded Cinema and In Focus Programmes Announced

In addition to Competition and Jury’s Choice programmes, 25 FPS brings several programmes focused on avant-garde classics and expanded cinema performances: Toshio Matsumoto’s Funeral Parade of Roses, Jung An Tagen and Rainer Kohlberger’s immersive audiovisual performance and a selection of Nathaniel Dorsky’s most recent work.

Kino 23: Funeral Parade of Roses

Kino 23 is a special programme of the 25 FPS Festival, intended for feature films that are not necessarily experimental, but possess an avant-garde sensibility in their aesthetics, dramaturgy, or perception of the world. This year, we are presenting Funeral Parade of Roses, Toshio Matsumoto’s shattering, kaleidoscopic 1969 masterpiece and one of the most subversive and intoxicating films of the late 1960s. It tells a story of Eddie, a popular entertainer working at a gay club Genet, who enters into a relationship with the club's owner in order to become the madam of the bar. The story serves as the setup for the immersion into the dazzling world of Tokio night life, performance arts, and counter-culture, which Matsumoto also explored in his previous film For My Crushed Right Eye (1968). A key work of the Japanese New Wave and queer cinema, cited by Stanley Kubrick as a direct influence on his own dystopian classic A Clockwork Orange (1971).

Last year, Funeral Parade of Roses was beautifully restored in 4K from the original 35mm camera negative and sound elements, and this is the version we are screening at the festival.

Expanded Cinema: Jung An Tagel & Rainer Kohlberger

Jung An Tagen is one of the pseudonyms of Stefan Juster, a Viena based musician and artist. He started his career on the post-noise tape scene, going on to publish a series of releases for labels like Not Not Fun or 100% Silk, using such pseudonyms as Cruise Family, Stefan Kushima, and others. In 2016, he started to release new work under the pseudonym Jung An Tagen, first for Orange Milk Records and later for Editions Mego. His LPs combine influences from early Detroit techno, trance, electroacoustic music, and high-end sound. 

After six years of intensively exploring polyrhythm and a combination of modern composition techniques and techno, Jung left the beats behind and turned fully to the acousmatic, electroacoustic side of his work. In these compositions, Jung engages deeper with the relation of digital sound and body, perceptive glitches and, as he would call it, “dissociative psychedelic music.” This performance follows the release of his album Emergent Properties under the newly founded label ETAT – a netlabel for new computer music founded by Stefan Juster himself.

In 2019, Jung started his collaboration with Rainer Kohlberger, an Austrian born freelance visual artist and filmmaker living in Berlin. At the 25 FPS Festival, they will showcase their audiovisual performance, in which they will create an immersive landscape for the audience, erasing the borders between the exterior and interior worlds.

In Focus: Nathaniel Dorsky

This year’s In Focus programme is dedicated to recent works of Nathaniel Dorsky, a legendary author of the American avant-garde cinema, co-organised with MI2 – MaMa in Zagreb. Nathaniel Dorsky entered the film scene in the 1960s with a series of poetic films that were compared to haiku poetry due to their specific sensibility. A follower and friend of Stan Brakhage, he expressed his religious devotion to cinema, while his friendship with Jonas Mekas engendered a committed exploration of the film core, elements and their relationships: light, rhythm, view and cut. His inclination towards celluloid and precise filmmaking stems from his belief that film can and should be a transcendental experience.

Dorsky’s recent films, contained in this programme, expand on his research of what he sometimes calls ”polyvalent” editing, a deviation from the Russian avant-garde experiments in the 1920s, as well as from the narrative demands of pop culture to improve the viewers’ capability of noticing subtleties of certain images and the complex web of ties that bind them.

The 16th edition of 25 FPS  is taking place from 24 to 27 September 2020 at SC Cinema in Zagreb and from 28 to 29 September at Art Cinema in Rijeka. Admission to all the screenings is free of charge.

Photos: Funeral Parade of Roses; Jung an Tagen + Rainer Kohlberger; Interlude