Day One: Opening, Disintegration, Branding & Rudimentary Topography
A four-day oasis of experimental film opens – without film! Julien Maire will warm our senses and grey cells with an anarchist performance called Open Core, somewhere between a lecture and a performance. We will analyse what are ‘moving images’ and ‘film medium’ in the first place, while Mr Maire will joyfully torture the cinematography and projection equipment in front of us to produce film images in technologically curious (or sanctimonious, as the profession would see it) ways – but ways telling something about the inherent qualities of the medium we all adore this much. Join us at the MM centre at 6pm for a destructive-constructive insight into the secrets of cinematic alchemy.
Afterwards, back to the darkness of SC’s cinema at 8pm, with two competition blocks! “Patterns”, like the ones Peter Tscherkassky prints onto the film strip (The Exquisite Corpus), transform the existing material, rebrand it, liberate its kinetic energy and put it back in motion. Movement arises from the patterns of clay/ceramic objects (Mr Sea, X. Geng) and neglected and rejected objects (Razzle Dazzle, J. Mack). The samples repeat through history and transform the experiences of colonial past in the present (The Island Is Enchanted with You, D. Schmidt and A. Carver). Experiences, when abstracted into simple, geometrically regular patterns, make new experiences and new stories (Here There, A. Stewart).
The “Charts” section at 10pm is presenting four creative attempts at drawing borders and measures: Ben Russell is preoccupied with the mental ethnography of the people in South Africa who still live in the shadows of Apartheid (Greetings to the Ancestors), Eric Stewart is trying to build a topography of mourning by scattering the ashes of his dead father onto 35 mm film (Wake), Pauline Julier documents the landscape of a micro-state in South Pacific implacably engulfed by the sea (The Disappearance of the Aïtus), while Philip Widmann embraces and tries to draw the parameters of the impossibility of documentary representation (Fictitious Force).
Danijel Brlas
Free admission to all events and programs.