24th Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival
Beyond the Mirror Rim
director: Thomas Kutschker
original title: Beyond the Mirror Rim
country: Germany
year: 2016
running time: 14 min.
synopsis
A collage of reflections on various artificial and natural surfaces forms fleeting, concrete and variable abstract visual compositions, with a voiceover meditation on forms of perception related to the acquisition and deepening of knowledge, from Antiquity to today’s technical and social influences on how we perceive the world. German director, photographer, cinematographer, and university lecturer Thomas Kutschker (1963) experiments with sound, mixing recordings from social networks from around the world with excerpts from old films to explore human fear and the yearning for knowledge. The Jihlava IDFF previously showed his films Shadow Worlds (2008), Me, Myself and I in the Age of Download (2010), and Financial Locations (Global Mash Up) (2015).
“Words, sounds and pictures seem to be independent, disconnected as the appearance of light, shadow and reflexion themselves... But they are woven into each other and connected following their own logical construction.”
biography
A collage of reflections on various artificial and natural surfaces forms fleeting, concrete and variable abstract visual compositions, with a voiceover meditation on forms of perception related to the acquisition and deepening of knowledge, from Antiquity to today’s technical and social influences on how we perceive the world. German director, photographer, cinematographer, and university lecturer Thomas Kutschker (1963) experiments with sound, mixing recordings from social networks from around the world with excerpts from old films to explore human fear and the yearning for knowledge. The Jihlava IDFF previously showed his films Shadow Worlds (2008), Me, Myself and I in the Age of Download (2010), and Financial Locations (Global Mash Up) (2015).
more about film
| director: | Thomas Kutschker |
other films in the section
This inventive experiment with a stereo 3D image follows a train track ending at a ruined bridge and then back again through the forest. The focus is on the spatial perception of diverse depictions of the journey laid side by side, captured with a film camera and confusing the eye of the viewer with various overlays and inversions of time levels.
“Stereo3D films shall be done such a kind that they make no – or another – sense if they where only in mono2D. What we know from flat filmmaking is no help. So filmmakers have to start from scratch again and spectators too.”
Dead End, rewind reversal
Björn Speidel
Germany / 2016 / 11 min.
section: Fascinations
World Premiere
Consistent manipulation of found footage showing people and faces in an urban landscape dissolved their movements into visual echoes. The melancholy remnants of the original film are subjected to the digital poetry of blurriness and the loss of meaning, gestures, and physical movements.
“Producing a film includes the process of creating copies. Duplication is built into the medium itself. The change in to new form creates a different experience, though nothing has changed in the content.” S. A. Fruhauf
Heavy Eyes Remastered
Siegfried Alexander Fruhauf
Austria / 2017 / 9 min.
section: Fascinations
World Premiere
Visual memories collected during the first year after the filmmaker’s graduation from university, altered using computer graphics to create disconnected particles of overlapping scenes showing various forms of depression from burnout, relationship crises, and a lack of physical and mental strength."Feelings that are impossible to be expressed by words can be shown through a camera or a computer." Y. Kawata
Proof of Memory
Yosuke Kawata
Japan / 2017 / 10 min.
section: Fascinations
Central European Premiere
Natural textures and close-ups of various surfaces of soil, rocks and water are vertically sliced and rhythmically abstracted. Within the stream of images, this tour of the outer world becomes a way of experiencing the landscape and its transformations, in whose regularity we can find stability and inner peace.
“Cho´s internal visions and perception of the outer world come together in an abstract meditation on space, place and sound. Natural landscapes are pushed to the edge of abstraction through layering and other forms of manipulation.”
Latency Contemplation 2
Seoungho Cho
United States, South Korea / 2017 / 8 min.
section: Fascinations
Czech Premiere
As the film comes undone from the projector, the perforated edges become visible and reveal the illuminated image as an imprint of light. Splotches of colour with vague meanings enter into the picture frame.
“In the early 19th century, watches had a rack and pinion lever escapement. No longer used, I still find it endearing and try to create a similar beauty in my own way.” H. Kawaguchi
rack-pinion (wired-glass No.4)
Hajime Kawaguchi
Japan / 2017 / 4 min.
section: Fascinations
International Premiere
Through the use of animation, the backlit photographs blend with the director’s aunt’s memories of the mountains, the local views, and the inside of the home from which she was forced into exile. The fragments of memory offer insight into life in the diaspora through architectural projects by which the aunt has recreated her native Tajikistan in her new home in Darmstadt.
"Film is grounded in found footage through the photographic, constructing an assemblage from fragments of exile. I focused on colour, texture, and materiality in both image and sound, resuturing diasporic time and space through the slowed-down gesture of animation." K. Friesen
Dushanbe
Kandis Friesen
Canada, United States / 2018 / 5 min.
section: Fascinations
European 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
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.”
Portbou
Agata Mergler, Cristian Villavicencio
Spain, Canada / 2016 / 4 min.
section: Fascinations
World Premiere
An ironic collage offers a reflection on lords and leaders, their gestures, attributes, characteristics, and deeds. The images, which oscillate between the credibility of archival footage and the artificiality of costume dramas on cardboard stage sets, become hyperboles of the typical attributes of power and engage in, are a radically rebellious play with punk expression. Khavn de la Cruz (1973) is a Philippine filmmaker, musician, and writer, a leading figure of the younger generation of Philippine cinema. He has helped produce 47 feature-length and 112 short films, and founded MOV, an international film, music, and literary festival in Quezon City. In addition to a number of feature-length films (Kamias: Memory of Forgetting, 1999, 2006 Jihlava IDFF; Manila in the Fangs of Darkness, 2008, 2008 Jihlava IDFF), a crosssection of his short films were presented at the 2006 Jihlava IDFF in the Translucent Beings section.“To reimage, rewrite, and reread my country’s bastard history, using dismembered icons and scenographies that both affirm and negate remembered mythology.”
Filipiniana
Khavn De La Cruz
Philippines / 2015 / 13 min.
section: Fascinations
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
The static footage shows just one thing: a person continuously swimming against the current. Despite swimming at a regular pace, the person stays in place. This image is accompanied by a recitation of a list of the filmmaker’s personal decisions and a description her micro-world, with references to her previous films and curatorial work. “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution,” we hear the words of American writer and feminist Emma Goldman, who promoted freedom of expression and the need for joy even amidst revolutionary struggle.
Some Exercise in Complex Seeing is Needed
Carola Dertnig
Austria / 2012 / 3 min.
section: Fascinations
Czech Premiere
The barcode from Form N-400 – the application for U.S. citizenship – is “naturalized” (a reference to “naturalization,” the term for becoming a U.S. citizen into the image, which is thus transformed into an abstract portrait of the applicant. At the same time, it is converted into sound by reading the visual code with an optical sound reader. Christina Nguyen (1988) hails from Los Angeles and studied visual art and media and molecular biology at the University of California in San Diego. She also received an MFA in film/video from the California Institute of the Arts. Edgar Jorge Baralt (1988) was born in Venezuela and studied film production at the University of Central Florida and at the California Institute of the Arts near Los Angeles, where he currently lives and works. His films explore the subjects of memory, time, and the changing nature of human identity.“The electronic version of the N-400 application form generates a barcode as personal information is entered. We take this conversion of identity into data further by turning this barcode into an audiovisual experience.”
Becoming American
Christina Nguyen, Edgar Jorge-Baralt
United States / 2016 / 1 min.
section: Fascinations
World Premiere
