Day 2: Appropriated Geography, Voracious Botany & Digital vs. Analogue War
As our festival story steps into its second day, Oona Mosna, programmer at Media City Film Festival in Ontario, begins her new daily story cycle. At 4pm, SC Cinema's floor will be taken by our grand jury members to present a three-day triptych, a sort of audiovisual mixtape of different genres and ideas.
Oona's slot, under the title Kino Play, brings this very fact to our minds – that cinema is a large children's playground and anyone who claims differently is a totalitarian enemy. Renaissance politicians become TV stars, Buster Keaton's TV performance becomes an outtake from a classic of European modernism, reverse shots and reactions search for a context, and a blind boy steals the film about himself by the sheer power of his own imagination – these are just a few sketches from today's Jury's Choice programme.
The first Competition slot, under the name Ratios (6pm, SC Cinema), features geo-locations that become scenes of speculative reality, made not only of their physical, material appearance, but also of an entire body of pop culture, autobiographical elements and historical connotations of human activity (The Watchmen, 025 Sunset Red, Peripheria). Leisurely setting with two horny lizards is devoured by gigantic hydrangeas, while the apiculture industry is in full bloom (Flores). Pixels wage an unrelenting war against HD in the form of a hallucinogenic exorcism session (20160815), while analogue bags of meat howl loudly and smear screen displays with tiny fingers out of a desperate need to connect with one another (See a Dog, Hear a Dog).
At 8pm we leave ratios and turn to Patterns: symphonies of energy lines and analogue video signals create alternative forms of spatiality (#67), analogue Framelines squeak under the pressure of multiple exposures and laser burning of 35 mm emulsion, sound forensics turns film into evidence material and a viewer into a juror in a court drama based on actual events (Rubber Coated Steel), while the existential drama of people living in rural areas of Ireland dissolves into a conflict (coitus?) between the subject of the representation and the means of expression (The Welfare of Tomás Ó Hallissy).
Cinematic anthropology leaves us in the dark, where exhausted, time-eroded bits of 16 mm film come from and compose the structure of Imperfect Film (Expanded Cinema section, SC Cinema, 10pm), performed by the Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Maia and the Swedish band SHXCXCHCXSH. Dark ambience soundscapes represent a warm hearth for analogue waste to comfortably stretch before and peacefully resurrect in their full celluloid glory – as though HD never happened.