Program diary II: Jury's Choice
The aim of the Jury’s Choice section is indeed to familiarise audience with inspirations and methods our professional jury members resort to while making their art. A program introduction by film critic Danijel Brlas.
Systems and methods behind every creative process of making a work of art are of use to a viewer in the process of conducting a dialogue with this work (in this case, a film). Trying to analyse, review or ponder over impressions in any sense, we will examine the artist’s method – or lack thereof – in an attempt to pass a value judgment on particular pieces. Method plus style equals creative signature – this is what the equation in fact sounds like and this is the only thing that matters. However, to the author of a piece, a method is a weapon. Realisation is preceded by a certain sense and followed by structural organisation. The entire artistic process could thus be viewed as systematisation or forced moulding of the material (landscape, persons, ideas etc.) into a predetermined concept. The aim of the Jury’s Choice section is indeed to familiarise audience with inspirations and methods our professional jury members resort to while making their art.
The rich work of Deborah Stratman opens a lot of questions on the relationship between environment and power control system. In a benevolent attempt to put her in a mould (but only for presentational purposes), we could include her among the disciples of the Californian school of the so-called ‘political landscape film’. Her programme partly depicts the concept of method in the creation of expression, most memorably demonstrated in Lightning (1976) by Paul and Marlene Kos, in which the protagonist because of her ‘programmed’ appearance in the shot every time spectacularly misses the anticipated flash of lightning in the background, while the simple reply she keeps repeating underlines the programmatic absurdity of the situation. Repetition of certain phrases ad absurdum highlights the alienating system in Last Words (1967), Werner Herzog’s early eccentric docu-piece. By way of dubbing, Robert De Niro spoke seven languages (through as many voices) in the same scene in Dubbing (2006) by Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki, and Hollis Frampton in Critical Mass (1971) used asynchronicity between image and sound (and several other radical editing procedures) to deepen the communication gap among two quarrelling sides. Connecting image to disparate sounds is a method Stratman often uses in her work: O’er the Land (2009), for example, is an attempt to create an audiovisual counterpart to national identity and the idea of freedom in the USA, as hysterical and semi-coherent as it sounds. Her conceptual predecessor Tom Palazzolo similarly unites baseball games, neo-Nazi gatherings, apple pie, Civil War re-enactments, catcher fights and many other things that authentic Americana make, all under the umbrella title Love It / Leave It (1973). Depending on the choice, you always get or miss too much.
British artist, curator and writer George Clark shares with Stratman a fascination with landscape mutations and all things human pathology, but the concept of his programme is more personal and autobiographical in nature. The programme under the title Films in Place of Places consists of works from the countries where Clark spent more or less time over the past few years. The films were mostly made by filmmakers exiled from their native countries, motivated by new experiences, nostalgia and alienation. The phone call in 0116643225059 (1994) connects Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s in Chicago with his native land, the Thai province of Khon Kaen. Here, like in other of his films, it is about creating ‘a suspended space’, an abstract place between ‘here’ and ‘there’ which cannot be materially depicted, only evoked. Joanna Margaret Paul longs for her family home in Wellington (Thorndon, 1975), Tito & Tita (Director’s Cat, 2013) miss their home cat, the Hong Kong-based ‘artivist’ Mok Chiu-yu is melancholy about his apolitical young fellow citizens (Letter to the Young Intellectuals of Hong Kong, 1978), and Californian artist Chick Strand made in Mexico a poetic surreal essay about the loss of innocence and essence of human spirit (Guacamole, 1976). Peter Hutton contemplates over the years he spent at sea in Southeast Asia (Images of Asian Music (A Diary from Life 1973-74), 1974), featuring a method of representing the intimate (inter)space to the extremes, abandoning film as a ‘collectivist’ art. Albeit private and hermetic in his intention, Hutton’s film is another invitation to a dialogue. George Clark, who incorporates his own travel footage in the programme, is the best witness to that.
An intimate depiction of space, in his own particular way, also comes from the third jury member, the world-renowned young filmmaker Dane Komljen. Since our last encounter (Surplus of Wind, 2014), Dane has expanded his vision to the feature length, took it on a tour of the Locarno festival, while the Croatian premiere will be the first pit stop on his way to the overseas first screening at the New York Film Festival. The film All the Cities of the North (2016), despite its globetrotting pedigree, focuses the narrative on a specific geographic location, an abandoned hotel resort on the border between Montenegro and Albania. An imposing, today forgotten dream of Yugoslav modernism, seen from above seems ‘like a constellation’ while on the ground its rigorous architecture is overgrown with vegetation. To Komljen’s lonely protagonists, the ruins are much more than a symbol of failed dreams and crumbling times. They are the place that connects people, a point of utopian reflection on ‘the new social order’ build on ‘garbage and surplus’; a shared space where people can be alone.
Methods compress space and time, they deaden them in order to shape them into sense. The risk, of course, threatens to make the final product a lifeless, inert message transfer agent. A film should never allow that to happen, says Spanish filmmaker and tech innovator José Val del Omar with a wink, the inventor of the ‘tactile illumination’ method, with which he demonstrated the power of film to bring to life monumental centennial fossils with a simple play of light and shadow. However, the methods expressed in and through the programmes curated by our jury are in that sense swings of a pickaxe against a cold surface. They allow for different interpretations, reading gaps, playfulness, even a lack of concentration – as long as some of the falling rocks ripple the mind flow in your head.
Danijel Brlas
Photo: Images of Asian Music (A Diary from Life 1973-74)