Program Diary 4: Hard Labour of Dreams and Hierarchy of Sensuality: 13th 25 FPS Jury’s Choice

The brainchildren and complex relationships of our Jury members towards the film medium have been filtered into three presentations for our traditional late afternoon festival slot. The jury members' selections are more than just a prelude to the (expanded) film programmes in the evening hours. Rather, they give us a chance to observe parallels through history and the deafening chaos of forms and ideas we call experimental film. 

Our dear guests are here with a task: to ask a bunch of questions and try to find some answers, or at least another bunch of sub-questions, in a dialogue with their fellow filmmakers' works. Mads (not that one, but that one) Mikkelsen, the curator and programmer at one of the most famous international documentary film festivals, CPH:DOX, is presenting a fiery bunch of recent Danish (plus one Norwegian-Japanese) short films, loosely definable in terms of genre, but exceptionally juxtaposed among themselves. Arrábida – There Is Only One Earth by Tinne Zenner presents a symbiosis of a concrete factory and wild nature surrounding it in the namesake nature park in Portugal. The artificial landscape is impressively worn out by time – concrete and steel pierce through the tree tops, stretch across the landscape, workers colonise it with their incessant activities, while at the same time flora finds its way to reach and prowl into the pores of an artificial structure. The whole thing is covered with a layer format symbiosis which registers everything, a grainy texture of an analogue 16mm film with digital pixels of topographic 3D animations. The roaring factory plant is just as intense as putting scenes together and tearing them apart into pixels. On the other hand, a light and shadow play at the place with most lightings on the planet – Rio Catatumbo in Venezuela – in The Place I Will Have Left by Lena Ditte Nissen, conveys a completely opposite impression to the impossibility of integration of different elements. A static monotony of falling rain, similar to TV screen's white noise, is unpredictably interspersed with sharp flashes, like a distant dying stroboscope or a lighthouse emitting panicky warning signals. Jeppe Lange's Flora expounds a brave hypothesis about the innocence and essential retardation of a film record – "a film knows nothing about the world" and all it is finally capable of offering is the texture of the portrayed world, not its representation. As the scene loses sharpness, fireworks become a forest, the forest becomes an oil on canvas etc. The texture remains the same. Self-destruction perpetuated and simulated in editing becomes a bizarre thesis/antithesis about the reanimating properties of film in Kåre Leander Ringling Frang's film Air (VW Golf III). The Lost Dreams of Naoki Hayawaka (Ane Hjort Guttu, Daisuke Kosugi) is seemingly a simple documentary/live action testimony of the namesake workaholic, led by everyday pressures to a shaky mental condition between sleep and wake, while the corporate shackles keep squeezing him and trying to obtain maximum creative energy. As the protagonist's dreamy eyes open wider and wider before the surge of existential horror, the film becomes an increasingly complex study of the trans-capitalist hyper-utilisation of an individual.

Oona Mosna is an international film curator and programmer at festivals across the world, a person of great experience in cinema and film reception. Her selection therefore mostly consists of titles revealing and challenging our viewing habits and prejudices. Kino Da! by Henry Hills, a 'zaumist' portrait of the poet Jack Hirschmann, is in fact a testament to the spiritual and kinetic power of the medium in the face of material boundaries. Mary Helena Clark placed Buster Keaton into Cocteau's Orpheus (Orpheus – outtakes) and scratched the fantasy elements of a cinematic piece and cinema's capability of bearing (or even sparking) the inscription of the viewer's own fantasies into its structure. Kevin Jerome Everson's Rhinoceros – the fictional 'portrayal' of the 16th century politician Alessandro de' Medici – treads along the similar line, structured as a TV broadcast in which the renaissance duke of African origin addresses his people. Austrian artist Friedl vom Gröller (Kubelka) searches for the truth through a series of photographs, reading between the lines in Erwin, Toni, Ilse, wondering how close or far should one get from the subject to capture their essence. Johan van der Keuken lays his weaponry before Herman Slobbe, a blind boy who learned to cope with the social 'sight pressure' by building imaginary worlds (Blind Child II). Abigail Child (Perils) and Andy Warhol (Haircut #1) are general classics in exposing constructed mechanisms within a film scene, as well as prejudices and expectations passive viewers take to the cinema or a TV screen. Made almost exclusively out of camera posing, shots of reactions, repetitions in different frames and using evocative, dislocated and violently butchered musical accents, his works are trying to rip off the camouflage veil from their audience's eyes and bring them to their turf. Essentially, they want to make us feel uncomfortable in our own skin until we recalibrate our senses and viewing dispositions.

The winner of the 10th edition of 25 FPS, Sebastian Buerkner (The Chimera of M.), is introducing himself with a projection performance named Reunion. A screening of an episode of a classic, well known TV series about everyone's favourite fumbling detective Columbo becomes a performance about the fragility of structuring perception. Ontological certainty in TV dramaturgy is sketchy and jeopardised by a series of intrusive experimental works: visual and verbal association play (Associations, Not I) testify to expressive discursive potentials, as well as our skill and dextrousness on the linguistic field; an anonymous poor woman helplessly falters and runs across the beach possessed by a defect mechanism for image and sound reproduction which infinitely terrorises her with an enormous animated umbrella (Beach Umbrella); a remake of Victor Flemin's classic film subverts the physicality of characters/actors by changing the players in every new frame and turning the characters into mumbling, flickering spectres on the screen (Episodes from the Life of Dr Jekyll / Mr Hyde) etc. Buerkner's manoeuvres duplicate the very narrative of the serial's episode in which a crime plot is based on sublimated film cuts which become literal physical deadly cuts. In the reunion, film cuts become literal interventions into the very tissue of a film scene/whole. A dose of schizophrenia injected among the standard elements of a film record makes the entire discourse twisted, occasionally completely insane and – let's not fool ourselves – bloody entertaining. 

Danijel Brlas