Day Two – How far can we see while looking in the dark?
After Julien Maire and his yesterday’s performance mercilessly destroyed the concept of moving images, jury member Anouk De Clercq and her film programme will give us a lesson in anatomy of another constructive element of film experience – a cinema.
A cinema experience is a special form of spiritual séance, implying immersion in darkness and silence (Black, A. De Clercq), establishing contact with the scenes which are only fabricated splinters of human presence (Negative Hands, M. Duras), a consent to be submitted to manipulation (The Girl Chewing Gum, J. Smith), and illusion (46 bis, rue de Belleville, P. Baes), but also participation in creating the illusion (Dissonance, M. de Boer). A cinema experience is something we create on our own, but also as a collective joined in darkness in a hypnotic trance. Let go off daylight and immerse into the darkness of SC cinema at 4pm – see you at ‘looking in the dark’.
At 6pm Croatian filmmakers turn to the subject of testimony. What kind of testimonial can a person convey on war traumas, how much this story can be hers alone, and how much a part of a collective story engulfing her self – these are the questions Nicole Hewitt will spin in the first in a series of performances and video works This Woman Is Called Jasna. In his Monument, Igor Grubić will give a voice to the ruins of anti-fascist monuments and silent testimony of decay.
The first competition block (8pm) focuses on relations: ratios between constituent parts and limitations in creating a film work (The End, T. Šoban), disproportionally large giraffe hearts in relation to the small hearts of big palm trees devoured by small red insects (Washingtonia, K. Kotzamani), relationships between small man and omnivorous nature in Everglades, Florida (Wayward Fronds, F. Silva), while an abandoned amusement park in Casablanca (Park, R. Maroufi) and a weapons factory in Austria (Embargo, J. Lurf) become the scene of challenging relations between different points of view and multiplying possibilities.
Scales (10pm) explore image and sound relations between modular synthesisers and simulated landscape (Sightings: Habitat, S. Ratté) and lead us into the hypersensitive world of people suffering from electromagnetic sensitivity (Quiet Zone, K. Lemieux and D. Bryant), permanently incapacitated for coexistence with almost any kind of social order. A project by O.N.L.S.D., Eden’s Edge, focuses on people living in American deserts, abstracting the existence of their dropouts through inhuman bird’s eye views – a view creating new scales beyond the social ones.
Danijel Brlas