Expanding audiovisual possibilities of film with Expanded Cinema and Kino 23

The 22nd edition of 25 FPS Festival features three expanded cinema performances, with a pioneer of the British avant-garde Guy Sherwin, filmmaker and artist Lynn Loo, and moving image composer Luis Macías. Sherwin and Lynn Loo will also present their specially curated film programme, and Kino 23 includes the explosive film Krakatoa by Carlos Casas.
 

This year’s Expanded Cinema segment includes three filmmakers. The first performance is the one by Guy Sherwin – his iconic Man With Mirror will officially open the festival, fifty years after its first performance. Sherwin’s poetic dialogue between memories and perception will be presented to the Zagreb audience on Tuesday, 22 September at 9pm, at Histrionski dom.

At the following Expanded Cinema performance, Sherwin will be joined by filmmaker Lynn Loo, with whom he has been collaborating for many years on 16mm projector performances. Their Washi MM is a handmade film using Japanese washi paper, made of mulberry tree bark, attached to a film stock. The visual structure at the same time generates a sound record, mixed live from three projectors. Washi MM is scheduled for Thursday, 24 September at 10:30pm at Kinoteka.

Sherwin and Loo have curated a special film programme, Conversations, as a symbiosis of two artistic dispositions – Loo, who grew up in the increasingly digitised Singapore, and Sherwin, who matured in the exclusively analogue United Kingdom. Such analogue-digital transmissions naturally stimulate ongoing conversation about the specific capabilities and limitations of both media. Their films are screened in the special section In Focus on Friday, 25 September at 6pm at Kinoteka.

The last expanded cinema performance will be the one by film artist Luis Macías, known for the works focusing on the spectrum qualities of image in motion, exploring the photochemical nature of the media. The Spectral Mountain is an immersive installation which, aided by ten panoramic images taken in the Pyrenees, creates a sensory experience in which nature blends with light. With ten serially positioned slide projectors, a loop of images creates a vibrating and oscillating landscape. Macías’s performance is scheduled for Friday, 25 September, at 10pm, Academy of Fine Arts.

The short film format will be complemented by the Kino 23 section, showing the hybrid film Krakatoa by Spanish filmmaker Carlos Casas. A story about a fisherman caught in the biggest volcano eruption in history combines speculative fiction, documentary sound narration and abstract scientific images. Starting from the sound re-enactment of the 1883 eruption, conjoined with the testimony of a survivor from the last eruption in 2018, Krakatoa explores the potential of the film medium to engross the viewers into a natural landscape experience through an audiovisual embodiment. The film is scheduled for Wednesday, 23 September, at 11pm, at Kinoteka.

Photo: The Spectral Mountain by Luis Macías