Fascinations

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

A visually ingenious portrayal of a life story and inner world of a soldier killed in an explosion is told through hypnotically visualized allegoric scenes and objects during an imaginary encounter of views by a scientist searching for a relation to reality, a filmmaker reflecting on a role of time in art and a refugee stripped of the possibility to live in his hometown. “The film was originated from the real story that a solder was killed by bomb while greeting to a civilian. It tries to recapture that moment of contradictories and fragilities.” H. Mao     

The paths of a flock of gulls diving for thrown pieces of bread are inverted into traces of light transforming the idyllic image into captivating abstract composition that evokes frenetic expressions of apparent anger or chaos. The effect is further underscored by his work with the sound, in which the cries of the gulls are converted into nervous echoes. “I’m working on the image and the sound /// in order to give new realities to ordinary life /// and share my audiovisual vision of the world /// in experimental video artworks /// since 2010.” J.-M. Rolland     

A surface rhythmised by reappearing image segments of a forest, gets projects during a walk, brought about also by the sound, into a space in which black-and-white and colour footage reveals monochromatic parts. These build up to create an effect of the third dimension, pulling our view into the depth and turning the ingenious schedule of the whole into a cognitive game using 3D representation."Below is not so much about borne suffering or the history of a memorial place. It tells more about the relation of depth-time and space-duration being interwoven in every moment of an image. " B. Spiegel

A visual study of the book as a medium and cultural artefact. Parallel images analyse books from the point of view of appearance and material with the film plunging into the depths of their microscopic fabric while, at the opposite end of the spectrum, the variety of their surfaces, textures, fonts and shapes blossoms into structured volumes ordered on a bookshelf. “Born from observing the phenomena of quietly vanishing old book stores, our work first became an exploration of the medium of the book itself, and then grew in to something more haunting.” E. Tammi, S. Ekström  

Out of the forests of north-eastern Brazil, an essay on the relationships with nature, location and soil grows out, developing into musings on the configuration of space, proprietary demands and care about landscape. Against the background of biological diversity, which stands for a commentary from the perspective of history and culture, it introduces the issue of ownership of forests, conceivably by those who inhabit them. "Kaleidoscopic and impressionistic views from a site in the in Brasilian 's sertão in which anthe Atikum artist Edson Barrus has preserved a tree: the Imburana which is a specy in danger. " Y. Beauvais

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     

A performative film that compiles close-up shots of concentrated faces with abstract images converging towards a distinct point of light and geometric shots of dancing figures to create an associative image of fireflies, which in Cuban mythology represent ghosts, echoes of fires, or souls passing in the night. “Through collaborative processes and experimentation, I make films that allow a sensory experience, expanding the spectator’s perception of the social/political/cultural/personal phenomenon portrayed.” C. Claremi 

A Cuban home as a non-place reflected in artefacts accessed through recollections, materials and textures. A delicate film poem is a collection of aberrations of the utmost intimate memory with scenes and activities referring to building, deconstruction, places and events that create associative reflections on the meaning of the term “home”.  “Starting from the portrait as a support and exploring its expressive possibilities, I enter into the reconstruction of beings and spaces that I have never known or visited.“ A. Alonso Estrella

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

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

Structures of lyrical scenes composed into shifting layers of geometric objects set out to work accompanied by noise minimalism, changeable perspective and close ups. Compositions made in this way, capturing trees, bushes, plants and rivers, recall the fluidity of landscapes and nature (or rather their concepts).  “Frames within a frame, this meticulous dual structure suggests psychological and visual provocations of linear aspects such as time and place, guiding the viewer to the moment of visual meditation.” S. Cho 

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     

A diary witness of the author’s journey to Moldovia, a country which her parents had been forced to leave in the 1930s due to their Jewish origin. Archival footage combined with stories of survivors recalls the exodus, war and totalitarianism, confronting images of local objects with scenes of traditional rituals.  “In my film I witnessed spaces and silently collected painful history that carved pain and suffer.” M. Piller

An anthology of rituals, masks, skin paintings, and other decorations, captured from up close in Ile-Ife, the legendary holy city of the Yoruba, who live primarily in southwestern Nigeria but also in some parts of Latin America and who consider the god Obatala to be the creator of Earth and of human bodies.  "I understand my cinematic practice as an inquiry into modes of experience and as a gesture of channeling. One of them could be the state of devotion and possession by spiritual and cosmic forces. " S. Wiedemann  

Memories of sounds, everyday artefacts, fragments of situations, visual traces of gestures along with fleeting expressions of inner movements bring about in a gentle way the blanks and losses in this diary essay on the paramount importance of space and behaviour, duration of (un)happiness and focus on the present moment as a means of defence against exhaustion. “A film about absence/bereavement; trying to remember "her" gestures and presence through scattered fragments of memories, reminiscences of sounds and a decaying silence.” V. Guilbert     

This slow-moving film creates intensive experience of continuously nearly indiscernible - yet in the length of the whole film invariably distinct - changes of shadows, spaces and shapes carved by dark branches into the light mist that besets the statue-like steadiness of the thickening forest just to relinquish it the very next moment. “I wrote poems on the streets, wary of irresponsible parables of nature. The imagination of the street was pain and I loved it. But I still believe that the greatest subverbs are in nature.” M. Yi       

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

The first part of a seven-part adaptation of the influential 1990 book of the same name by American philosopher and art theorist Noël Carroll. In the spirit of cinematic philosophy (filmosophy), Lichter explores various aspects of the horror genre – in this part, primarily the position of the characters, the human bodies, and the types of gazes to which they are subjects – by directly manipulating the body of the film. “The Philosophy of Horror: A Symphony of Film Theory is an immersive meditation on genre theory, which aims to demonstrate the eternal beauty of Art Philosophy and Pop Culture’s interconnectedness.” B. Máté, P. Lichter    

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

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     

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."

A compilation of behind-the-scenes footage shot while filming various Filipino films, including those of Lav Diaz and Erik Matti, creates a sense of quiet tension. In the style of slow narrations and in-depth observation, the film builds a dystopian sci-fi narrative of human avatars controlled by applications but is also a commentary on the various forms of contemporary Filipino cinema.    “They say once a filmmaker becomes a parent, that person stops making films. The Remote Daddy Framework is a way for me to go out of the house to document in spurts of three hours to repurpose and make" J. Torres

Another contribution of this authoress to the reflection of genre films, this time dealing with romantic melodrama, confronts the expressive character of the film medium with the viewers’ perception in radical juxtapositions of eyes closely observing the movie Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and spots of red, green and blue colours that bite into them accompanied by harrowing noises and music. “Who's Afraid of RGB plays with self-referentiality in art, with the relation between artwork and viewer, references to other works of art and to scientific fields, as here to psychophysiology.” B. Roisz