24th Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival
Where Shapes Come From
director: SEMICONDUCTOR
original title: Where Shapes Come From
country: United Kingdom, United States
year: 2016
running time: 11 min.
synopsis
A description of non-randomness in the processes by which atoms join to form matter, accompanied by images from a museum laboratory. Subtle alterations to the real image are Formulas with scenes of a mineralogist’s work. Chemical equations and virtual bodies and shapes give form to the invisible processes involved in the creation of substances.
“We spent an intensive three months as artists in residence in the Mineral Sciences Laboratory at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History; this is the work that came out. The green workshop has since been redecorated and is no longer home to all these amazing curiosities.” R. Jarman, J. Gerhardt
biography
Semiconductor is the British artistic duo of Ruth Jarman (1973) and Joe Gerhardt (1972), who have been making experimental videos together for nearly twenty years. Using digital technology, they capture the materiality of nature and its structure from a scientific perspective while refl ecting on how it is represented in the media. Their unique work made in collaboration with research centres such as CERN and NASA has been shown at major festivals including the Venice Biennale.
more about film
| director: | SEMICONDUCTOR |
| producer: | SEMICONDUCTOR |
| editing: | SEMICONDUCTOR |
other films in the section
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The Sight
Jeremy Moss
Canada, United States / 2012 / 4 min.
section: Fascinations
Central European Premiere
An archeological collage of observations of the traces left by life on the landscape, combined with reflections on ephemerality and historical legacy, set to a music-and-noise composition. Motifs of reincarnation and a possible return, collected while traveling through the former Yugoslavia, culminate with a visit to an abandoned family farm, now accessible only by illegally crossing the border to the European Union.
“Through collaborative ways of experiencing how history collides with the present, my work embraces the complexity of a landscape while in the process questioning my own nostalgic and desiring gaze.” R. Ferko
Hrvoji, Look at You from the Tower
Ryan Ferko
Canada, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia / 2019 / 17 min.
section: Fascinations
European Premiere
Microsoft created the Webdings font in 1997 as a successor to Wingdings, around which controversy had developed when it was discovered that certain sequences of characters possessed unwanted connotations. The film was made in Microsoft Word and transferred onto 16mm film.
Places With Meaning
Scott Fitzpatrick
Canada / 2012 / 3 min.
section: Fascinations
East European Premiere
A re-construction of the illegal smuggling of a family across the border from East to West Berlin in 1988. Told in photographs, the film shows a chilling story of escape in the trunk of a car and an encounter with agents of the East German secret police. The images’ unknown origin adds a sense of the universal and calls into question the course of events.
"While researching my first feature, I stumbled across these photos in the Stasi archives and decided to try to make a story around them. I was shocked when I found out the true identity of the people " S. Calonico
The Escape Agents
Scott Calonico
United Kingdom, German Democratic Republic, Germany / 2018 / 5 min.
section: Fascinations
World Premiere
This portrait of architect Carlo Mollino looks at the vision of organizing space, buildings or sculptures. Contours and surfaces, as well as the absence present in crossed-out notes, crumpled sketches and the shapes and textures of material and scratched patters of houses, construct a rhythmic collage of expressions to the landscape.
“By way of story, C. Mollino pledged himself to his craft and foreshadowed a brilliant lifetime of architecture. In telling this story, Domus configures its author’s own intentions, transposed from architecture and housed within cinema.” R. Vermette
Domus
Rhayne Vermette
Canada / 2017 / 15 min.
section: Fascinations
International Premiere
An essay on exploitation of homes of native inhabitants and the behaviour of colonists breaks out into an anti-capitalist political pamphlet resulting in divergent horizontal and vertical motifs of a critical analysis of liberal cosmopolitan elites toward life space as a single-use, expandable commodity, contradicting its displaceable character.
"To build other worlds, one needs not to abandon western mind-structure but to transduce it with local, specific and ancient notions. This film is the beginning of a quest towards that realization." E. Makoszay Mayén
The River Escapes
Eduardo Makoszay Mayén
Mexico, Brazil / 2019 / 9 min.
section: Fascinations
International Premiere
From a green surface emerge the contours of a tree standing on the edge of a rainforest, the branches lightly swaying and the leaves slowly slicing traces of their movement into the endless plain. Even if in some places the surface of the image has healed, digital disintegration can cut off another piece, and this process does not cease until the tree dissolves into the uniform mist.
Árvore da Vida (Madeira)
Jacques Perconte
France, Portugal / 2013 / 9 min.
section: Fascinations
East European Premiere
A view of the landscape of the American Southwest, where the largest organism on Earth grows – a 60,000-year-old colony of quaking aspens – was filmed with a digital camera through the take-up reel of a 16mm projector in order to emphasize the characteristic effect of projected film material which rhythmically warps the space in front of the projector. Patrick Tarrant (1969) is originally from Melbourne, Australia and teaches at London South Bank University. He is the author of meditative films, that draw on the atmosphere of cities and urban peripheries.“My repurposing of a 16mm film projector warps space in three dimensions in order that we might reflect on our journey from a people who feared the natural world to people who must now fear for the natural world.”
The Trembling Giant
Patrick Tarrant
United Kingdom / 2016 / 19 min.
section: Fascinations
East European Premiere
Fragmentary images reflect the ability of the neural network to preserve an imprint of what we see (even if as a mere flash) and provide a strong visual experience from specific found motifs that dissolve into their constituent parts, while encouraging moments of intense introspection and leaving room for our imagination, all of it presented as a provocative dialogue with immediate memory. Daïchi Saïto hails from Japan but studied literature, Hindi, and Sanskrit in the USA. He first started working with film in Montreal, where he co-founded the Double Negative art group. He is an author of many short films and video installations. Jihlava IDFF screened his rees of Syntax, Leaves of Axis (2009).“My films d on’t talk about so cial or political issues, but instead it is important for me to think about the mode of filmmaking as having so cial and political implications.”
Engram of Returning
Daïchi Saïto
Canada / 2015 / 18 min.
section: Fascinations
Czech Premiere
Ghostly hills and inhospitable landscapes created by physically deformed newspapers are a critical allegory of the inner workings of the contemporary media world in which, beside journalists who still hold in esteem reliable and verified information, the voice of those crooking facts and creating parallel and alternative “realities” intensify by the day.
“A fact is supposed to be specific and verifiable. The fact you are willing to accept makes your reality of this world. Watch out! There are many different versions of each fact.” Y. Nishimura
Shapes of Facts
Yoshiki Nishimura
Japan / 2019 / 10 min.
section: Fascinations
World Premiere
A sensitive, impressive collage of intimate reflections, detailed observations, fragments of memories, and visual and musical allusions conducts an imaginary dialogue about how memory works and identity construction with a father who died a year earlier."What is a film if not collective dreaming made by conscious minds. Symbolism and myths are present in both dreams and films and rely on our memory and imagination for relating to the produced imagery." M. Lizides
Wax and Feathers
Marios Lizides
United Kingdom, Cyprus / 2018 / 15 min.
section: Fascinations
World Premiere
The movements of the ferry, creating additional disturbances in the waves of the Mediterranean Sea, enable the creation of colorful compositions, unexpectedly degraded algorithmic interventions of digital compression which in inventive surfaces and grids mask and repeatedly renew the authenticity of the record of the voyage, while the horizon becomes an escaping uncertainty. Jacques Perconte (1974) is a leading figure on the French avant garde film scene. He experiments with digital images, codecs, and compression algorithms that he himself creates. Thematically he focuses primarily on the relationships of contemporary culture and technologically advanced civilizations with nature. His work has been screened at past Jihlava IDFFs: L (2014), Les Moutiers (2012), and Ettrick (2015), among others.“The wind blew from the starting of the ferry. Offshore, the swell could make the travel difficult, but that boat would split the sea and project its Mediterranean blue in the golden sky and the fire light of the setting sun in the waves.”
Save (My heart from the world)
Jacques Perconte
France / 2016 / 10 min.
section: Fascinations
East European Premiere
