LATENCY/ CONTEMPLATION 5

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

A matrix of experiences and reflections from the author’s journeys between Berlin and Hiroshima was constructed by gushing together systems containing from 4 (or 2 times 2) to 625 (25x25) artist’s Facebook statuses in 7 identically long intervals of time. A suggestive accumulation of images evokes oversaturation in which the meaning and uniqueness of individual moments get lost. "There is a tension between past en presence I like to explore. Contemplating the riddles of cause and effect, may be. No text, no word, experience. Nothing logical within a conceptual framework." T. Mohr     

Patiently persistent mist conceals trees in the Eden River valley in northwestern England in a restless image draws the viewer’s attention to the visible image field, while its frame emphasizes the border of the unseen in the phenomenological stillness of the implied landscape. John Woodman (1948) focuses on experimental film and video art, about which he has even written a number of books (Structure of Chance, In Search of the Sacred, Sequences). One of the primary themes of his work is landscape and how it is differently perceived in relation to time, season, and light. His work has been presented at many international festivals.“Fields in Mist, filmed through heavy fo g, is an investigation of light, duration, revelation, visual appearance and disappearance. The scene is gradually revealed and then obscured by mist presenting a reflexive and contemplative viewing experience.”

Genre conventions cleverly broken down with animations, breaking through the scenery of rural Mexico, where in the area surrounding the director’s family farm, symbols of stories of physical desire conceal a layer of idyllic childhood memories and come into conflict with the traditional concept of masculinity and identity expression.   "By centering queer desire within the story of my Mexican-American family, I validate my own lived experience as well as challenge popular representation of masculinity, power and vulnerability." A. G. Gomez  

Raw film material consists in part of gelatin, which is made of the skin and bones of animals, including horses. The traces of light that shape our audiovisual dreams are thus imprinted on parts of animal bodies. Through the subtle use of audio, this found-footage collage focuses on images of the horse as an attraction, an animal of burden, and a mythological creature.  "In 1900 there were 130,000 working horses in Manhattan. Horses were a central part of our lives. Jeremy Bentham: "The question is not: can they reason? Nor, can they talk? But, can they suffer?" M. Hoolboom  

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.”

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   

In rhythmically changing parallel scenes, this visual atlas of the underwater world shows animals and their natural movements, waving plants and growing crystals, but also the rooms, machinery and equipment at the Copenhagen aquarium that has exhibited these living being for more than 70 years. “While filming I was pulled into a melancholic and haunted realm. The collapsing aquarium became an allegory of a shared past and time itself. It represents an enchanted place where both the struggle to remember and to forget intertwine.”

Delving for a brief moment into an everyday scene, we see various movements at various speeds and experience microstories representing the familiarity of the street. The classical technique of analytical slowing down different parts of the image at different speeds is used to capture an otherwise invisible phenomenon. “Sometimes in a flash you become aware of the fact that time does not matter.” M. Manchevski

The image’s fragile cohesiveness, disturbed by digital disintegration and overlays to create a visually impressive composition, emphasizes the need to think about remediated messages on the subject of nationalism and militarism, for the filmmaker works with images of Palestinian fields being burnt by Jewish settlers and vows taken by Israeli soldiers at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. “My work tracks patterns in nature, landscape and human form, perceived by camera and mind, struggling to comprehend the vast intensity of the living experience of the world through electronic media.“ G. Silberstein     

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.”

Wave follows wave. Real movements of the ocean, redrawn by computer-generated animation, flow into the picture frame in relation to real-time wind speeds, their visibility defined by natural light levels. The monotonous sound further emphasises the endless irregularity of the observed. “3D Computer Graphics have powers for making new images. They are mostly used for entertainment. However, they can surely be applied more to creating new methods and ideas for exploring experimental expressions.” Y. Nishimura