Staring Eyes and Undigested Landscapes: In the Focus of the 13th 25 FPS
On Wednesday we start with a film workshop by OJOBOCA. Ojoboca is a story of two people who took the phrases 'filmmaking' and 'film work' very liberally and opted for an archaic method of film production to materialise projections of the present real and imaginary (is there a difference between the two?) worlds as feverish visions of the future of mankind.
Anja Dornieden has been collecting decrepit hard drives, salvaging the data – images, texts, random computer codes – gluing them onto empty film tapes and thus she made her debut film Enter (2008), completely without camera's mediation. Juan David González Monroy roamed the streets of New York City, recorded bits and pieces onto 16 mm and saved rejected film materials. Then he locked himself in the darkroom, hand-processed them, soaked them in bowls with chemical developer fluids and hung them on a string. By doodling on the film tape and with the help of an optical printer he made several films, like How to Catch a Mole in 2009. The following year Anja and Juan David completed their studies in NYC and moved to Berlin, where they became connected with the LaborBerlin art collective and started to manifest their filmmaking obsessions on a regular basis under the moniker of Ojoboca.
A few years before their fellow filmmaker and designer Pam Tiezte launched an insanely impractical but aesthetically daring and attractive brand of kaleidoscopic sunglasses made of crystal prisms from expensive chandeliers – a fashion accessory which might cause migraines, but also ideally make you "feel like a tourist in your own environment" – the Ojoboa team made their first film together, Awe Shocks (2011) out of a cheap kaleidoscopic lens bought in a museum gift shop. The idea was to make a total antithesis to its touristic museum use, and they set their hearts at a kaleidoscopic orgy with computer screen online pornography. What is normally an unavoidable part of children's toys, mobile phone filters and extravagant facial accessories of cultured hipsters, in Ojoboca's hands becomes a means to delve into the realm of the senses. The typical visual combination was soon complemented by text, the narrator's voice which completes and often counterpoints the scenes, occasionally sounding as if it is shaken by internal demons. The voice leading us through the labyrinth is very consciously an agent of someone's manipulation, to the point of making us not only question its connection with the image, but also try to grasp the broader, narrative scope of what we observe even beyond the scene. The working method was established. Quirky and somewhat crazy, occasionally (depending on the work) capable of inducing a headache, chill, sense of loss and euphoria, but by no means reducible to the level of a 'virtual tourist postcard'.
The name itself is quite telling, or better yet, illustrative towards the directions in which this Berlin-based duo is trying to kick us: "ojoboca" is an ingenious Spanish translation of Pier Paolo Pasolini's hypothesis of a camera as 'eye-mouth'. Because, why not. The eye of the camera devours reality and cinema transforms all of its real subjects into symbols, making us live/reinterpret them in a primordial fashion, beside or beyond social conventions. The mouth in that sense acquires very violent connotations, the camera becomes a thug trying to 'repair' the way we perceive what we see by force. However, the mouth also has a more benign connotation of a narrative medium: it is simply an organ for telling tales. González Monroy himself likes to stress this analogy: "Cinema is a machine addressing us, telling us a story. According to the dynamics of the medium, this machine is programmed by the filmmaker to address each and every pair of eyes and eyes in the audience in person." Also, this machine might only want to entertain us or smack us on the head with a club, relax us or shake us up; it can be a sweet-tongued philanderer, a militant preacher, a raving liar – or anything in between.
Apart from gorging and yapping, our mouth also serves as a means of non-verbal communication: we distort it on a daily basis into a broad spectrum of grimaces to express our state of mind, we make lines between the lines, we reveal or hide what we really think and feel. One of the performances Ojoboca is presenting in 25 FPS's programme, Now I Want to Laugh, refers precisely to this biologically innate quality, creating by way of 16 mm projectors a distorted humanoid spectre trying to simulate an expression of a smile. Grotesque and absurdity are amplified to the extent that they keep us in a state of tense anxiety for 15 loud minutes. Distortion and cacophony might seem a hoot in the first 30 seconds; after that everything retains its humour, but nevertheless strikes some dark currents of our collective unconsciousness more calculatedly.
This year we will get to know Ojoboca in all the main aspects of their activity: next to the aforementioned piece, the Expanded Cinema section features a performance under the title New Museum of Mankind, a slow pornographic soap opera with a disintegrating vocal and a stroboscopic crescendo. A film slot under the name Bright Darkness is composed of two works. Cloud Shadow is a masterful demonstration of the concept of a 'traumascope': a slide screening accompanied by narration (this time a levelled female voice) turns out to be a testament of mysteriously disappeared inhabitants of a small town, who left behind only a machine projecting a load of scenes onto the walls of a cave on the edge of town. As the soft voice explains coldly, trauma imprints images onto the human retina (which we all know because we saw Italian giallo thrillers!), and the bigger the trauma the more beautiful the scene. Implied sadism echoes across the pleasurable scenes which dissolve into one another. Soon we no longer have an idea what we are watching: if what is behind the scene – what gives it texture – a projection surface, the cave's surface or another scene blended across this first one. The Masked Monkeys are almost a parody in their eloquent, news coverage educational discourse: while we are watching a group of Indonesian monkeys trained to be top class street performers, a narrative in voice over gracefully metamorphs into a collage of instructions from self-help literature.
Ojoboca has no intention of taking us on a trip to faraway exotic lands. They only ask us to let them have our eyes and mouth and to finally feel this silent flutter in our stomachs. Because Ojoboca will chew all these scenes for us, even spit them into our mouths, and then it will move away and let us figure it out by ourselves how to digest this audiovisual ball of wonders. But they will most gladly show us how to produce such powerful affects by very cost-efficient means – which is precisely the starting point of Anja and Juan David's work. No Dominion – Everything Speaks is the name of a film workshop scheduled to take place during the festival, which will take its participants on a trip across the creative processes of rummaging around their own environment searching for potential film materials/expressive means, the essential elements of working with 16 mm film and diverse brutalities which can take place in the darkroom and during the screening. Come, leave no stones on your way unturned (and make sure to check underneath!), stay hypnotised, feast on impressions and arm yourselves with alternative filmmaking material. The eye-mouthed beast is ready for you.
Danijel Brlas