Midsummer

Masha Vlasova / United States, Finland / 2024 / European Premiere / 3 min.

synopsis

This film poem was created during Juhannus, the Finnish celebration of the longest day of the year, using cyanotype, a contact copying process that uses light-sensitive iron salts in contact with UV light to create typically blue prints of objects. The illuminated shapes of leaves, stems, twigs, and fluff wander across the film material with increasing intensity, occasionally interspersed with flashes of blossoming flowers and a girl. The visual composition is accompanied by a delicate soundtrack composed of insect voices, the rustling of grass, and occasional jingling.

“Over its short runtime, Midsummer becomes increasingly cluttered with complex forms, some of which appear more photographically based than the initial rayographs. This prompts a slight confusion between figure and ground, such that we cannot tell what may have been photographically registered on the film in the first place.” — Michael Sicinski

Source: In Rewiew Online.

biography

Masha Vlasova is an experimental and documentary filmmaker of Russian origin who teaches at Oxford College at Emory University in Georgia. She has won awards at international experimental film festivals for her films Her Type (2021), Un-Tidal (2022), and Solar Storm (2023). As a theorist, she contributed to the anthology Constructions of the Real (2023) with a chapter entitled “Psychogeographic Choreography,” in which she discusses handheld camera work.