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 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.
 

This year’s edition of Odes to Film, with a film screened before each competition program, glorifies the magical symbiosis of original experiment and promotional material. Although at first we would not want to leave them alone in a dark room with sharp objects, the experimental and the commercial often proved good comrades in the audiovisual media domain, and their interactions often yielded impressive and hilarious results.

Night before the 11th 25 FPS Festival edition kicks off, on 23rd of September at 22:48, Third Program of the Croatian National Television broadcasts Free Radicals - A History of Experimental Film, feature documentary by Pip Chodorov, portraying great filmmakers - Robert Breer, Stan Brakhage, Peter Kubelka, Jonas Mekas, Michael Snow, Ken Jacobs and others.

Deleuze’s The Movement Image is sitting on a strange mount in the middle of the stage, before the film screen, numbly facing the audience. Once it squeezed under philosophers’ arms, imprinted its great ideas into the minds of film enthusiasts, fed its hermetic theories to the masses of film scientists and other scholars. Its name spilled across the lists of references below countless texts, from distinguished essays to theses and ambitious student papers. And now it dwindles in the dark of a screening room, scruffy and wrinkled like an alcoholic in rehab, exposed to the public view, but nevertheless too far to communicate anything.

Three characters in search of an authentic cinematic experience – perhaps this is the bestway to describe programmes curated by the 25 FPS jury. This year’s jury consists of three individuals orbiting across different spheres of film activity, with quite diverse fields of interest, but equal fascination in the film medium and its capability to provide something that goes beyond our sensory frame with its audiovisual stimulation.