LATENCY/ CONTEMPLATION 5

Contemporary and archival footage of the Berkeley Pit, an open pit copper mine in Montana – today filled with contaminated water – is chemically altered using poisonous substances from this water containing copper, arsenic, cadmium, zinc, and sulfuric acid in order to call attention to the destructive consequences of mining. “The film shows the destructive consequences of mine waste through a variety of photochemical processes using the same contaminants found in the water of the pit.“ J. Gerlach

A philosophical portrait of situationalists Herbert Holl and Kza Han, who believe in revolution through art. They live on an island where they have written poems and translated the work of Alexander Kluge. Together they enter a landscape with gestures and artifacts as their considerations for symbols and individuality permeate though film sketches from their everyday life."We love Herbert and Kza’s way of thinking. So we tried to traslate that in little performance. Each day we came up with a strange idea. They were surprised, but always put confidence in us."

Images originally from the tests of spotlights are inserted into models where they evoke the phases of the Moon and in regular intervals combine to hint at a harmonic line of bright reflections. A fleeting arrangement of the traces of humans and machines forever trapped in the depths of the night.  "The Moons of Palaver had to be short, quiet, with soft light, gently mechanical, edited late in the night, a paradox and a mystery. It had to be a poem that I couldn’t possibly write." E. Gaucher  

The disappearance of flowing textures of fluid and rocky landscapes alternates with patterns set in a grid of homogenous horizontals in a simple lyricism of hypnotic image and sound compositions and views of unexpected rhythms in flowing montages. "My ongoing questioning of the oscillations between my internal visions and the outer world comes with its own intrinsic intuition and metamorphoses my perceptions." S. Cho  

An exploration of the place, plants, stones, and buildings in a village located in a rocky bay in northeastern Catalonia near the French border, where Walter Benjamin died and is buried. A tactile encounter with a place, made using a prototype haptic camera that records the objects its user touches from unexpected perspectives. Agata Mergler is a postgraduate student of the humanities at Canada’s University of York, where she is involved in developing apparatus that record what their users touch. Cristian Villavicencio Ruiz (1984) is from Ecuador and is studying at the University of the Basque Country in Leioa. His work explores the relationship between tangible and visible perception and how it changes during the digital transfer of stimuli using modern technologies.“In our collaborative work using DIY digital prototype ‘haptic cameras’ provides us with opportunity to question the hegemony of the visual and the role of touch in moving image production.”

Tiny animals of different kinds were filmed by night and then magnified under semi-transparent spherical glasses. The activity of constantly moving organisms subjected to magnification results in unexpected images of unrest, changeability, migration and creativity in altering shapes. „La notte salva is a path of sensations that attempts to gather around its nature without revealing it, without opening itself to any human language.“ G. Boccassini

A meditative evocation of the South Korean “Candlelight Revolution” in the winter of 2016/17. The hybrid mosaic, in which archival and contemporary footage is altered by visual manipulation and performative moments, shows artifacts, situations, and gestures reflecting the desire for political change.  "The sense of vulnerability facing the unimaginable change made it only possible to borrow the quotations from the past and the future." S. Kim, J. Cho  

Minor irregularities are transformed into an elemental disorder of growing, jumping, decaying and reappearing bubbles, only to become focused into a circle of changing colors. Using digital tools, the author depicts the simple process by which water boils and cools again. Japanese experimental filmmaker, producer, and computer artist Yoshiki Nishimura has shown several of his films at previous editions of the Jihlava IDFF. In Fascinating Moments (2014) he followed the choreography of snowflakes, An Observation (2013) is a composition of upside images of the sea, and Orbiting (2015) explored the changing light of the moon as it shines through a visually manipulated digital image.“By using different media, we have great possibilities of expanding our views of reality into various directions.”

Made on 35mm film without the use of a camera, this film is dedicated to British musician and composer of electronic and concrete music Delia Derbyshire. The filmmaker works with drawings of Derbyshire’s scores and visualizations of her sound and music inventions, accompanied by a musical collage of sound compositions for theater performances. British filmmaker Mary Stark’s artistic roots are in textile design, which she uses as inspiration for her films. Her audiovisual works experiment with the sounds of factories and recording and projection equipment. Besides making films, she also creates audiovisual installations in which she works with the human body, light, shadow, and the materiality of the filmstrip.“My approach is led by directly handling the filmstrip and considering film as a sculptural mass, exploring how it can be presented as a visible tactile material and placed centre stage.”

Christiana Perschon shot her meeting with the artist Linda Christanell, a representative of Austria’s feminist avant-garde of the 1970s, on double 8mm fi lm without cutting. When shown, the fi lm’s split image shows footage of the two women fi lming one another to create a dialogue on seeing and being seen. “Every interaction with an image searches for its own form.  Approaching someone with my camera is not a one-way encounter but an act of getting to know each other: I see you seeing me instead of looking at you.” C. Perschon

Other possibilities of the sea. Digital impressionism, expressed through a patient deconstruction of the image into moving colours, set to the subtle sound of a never-ceasing wind. The rocking motion, further emphasized by contemplating slowness, evokes a sense of the permanently changing waves. “It is a long and deep inner journey in our relationship with violence and memory. Digital moving images are made to maintain information stable. But we can break it. ” J. Perconte

A visual miniature made of a single image strip, evokes the process of wandering through the landscape through both captured images and through images made by motion of their individual parts, resourcefully putting in use optic features of film imprint in order to let the scenes disappear in the structure of the material by blurring and slurring their outlines. “I build shutterless cameras to bypass sequential frame-by-frame recording and document reality using an uninterrupted flow of light. The world appears melted together in a single image shifting in time.” U. Petronin