Date: 1 November 2003 | Season: London Film Festival 2003 | Tags: London Film Festival
VIDEO VISIONS
Saturday 1 November 2003, at 2pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3
Ezra Eeman, Look at me standing here, Belgium, 2001, 8 min
An apparently mundane view of a pedestrian area … what is happening? Image seamlessly sticks and cuts, sound drifts from super-realism to atmospheric score. Time suspends as the sense of alienation and displacement distends. The centre of the city is a lonely place.
Pierre-Yves Cruaud, Le Silence est en Marche, France, 2001, 4 min
A horizontal arrangement of bands of light slowly gives way to emerging human forms, seen from above, passing through the frame. Though digital manipulation, a situation is suggested, but never seen. Sound is a sonic crackle and pulse.
Michaela Schwentner, Jet, Austria, 2003, 6 min
Dynamic recycling of treated and degraded video, structured to a track by electronic sound artists Radian.
Keiichi Tanaami, WHY Re-Mix, 2002, Japan, 2002, 10 min
Footage of a boxing match is reduced to printed still images and its constituent dots are enlarged and contrasted into an optical moiré. Assault not insult. A blitz of sound and image by Japanese animator, graphic designer Tanaami, based on his 1975 film Why.
Steve Reinke, Anal Masturbation & Object Loss, USA, 2002, 6 min
Reinke protests the ubiquity of theory and conjecture, while proposing a new art school where nothing is produced except discourse. To protect the students from undue influence, the pages of the library books must be glued together.
George Kuchar, Forbidden Fruits, USA, 2002, 15 min
George’s video diaries continue, slipping between reverie and reality, with a visit to the SF Art Institute, dinner in Chinatown and a lush daydream of sprouting seduction. Sap rises and spring swings when a tour of a friend’s garden detours into flights of floral fantasy.
Peter Rose, The Geosophist’s Tears, USA, 2002, 8 min
Travelling shots from a cross-country road trip are tiled and matted to propose impossible vistas.
Gerhard Geiger, Franz und Klara, Germany, 2003, 4 min
Geiger seeks an equivalent, format-specific editing style for digital video, to those techniques he has used for concentrated 16mm filmmaking.
Wago Kreider, Marvelous Creatures, USA, 2003, 3 min
Gaudily lit waxworks of Hollywood icons and the animals of a diorama, rapidly intercut with their subjects’ natural environments – classic movies and the zoo.
Jeroen Offerman, The Stairway at St. Paul’s, Netherlands-UK, 2002, 9 min
Inspired by rumours of satanic messages hidden in rock records, Offerman memorised and performed the vocal track of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’ in its entirety, backwards. A continuous shot taped outside St. Paul’s Cathedral and then reversed to present the classic song in a skewed, but legitimate, new way. Sincere, admirable, and very, very funny.
Tony Cokes & Scott Pagano, 5%, USA, 2001, 10 min
Critical commentary on the business practices of the music industry, ripping apart the illusory promises made to the consumer.
Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, I Am A Boyband, Canada, 2002, 6 min
A music video for a group of cloned pop stars. Nemerofsky Ramsay splits his own personality to create the perfect boy band of four distinct and desirable youngsters. All the ingredients are there; and it makes so much sense on a commercial level. Their song of heartbreak is an Elizabethan madrigal, ‘Come Again, Sweet Love’ by composer John Dowland (1563-1626).
PROGRAMME NOTES
VIDEO VISIONS
Saturday 1 November 2003, at 2pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3
LOOK AT ME STANDING HERE
Ezra Eeman, Belgium, 2001, colour, sound, 8 min
An apparently mundane view of a pedestrian area … what is happening? Image seamlessly sticks and cuts, sound drifts from super-realism to atmospheric score. Time suspends as the sense of alienation and displacement distends. The centre of the city is a lonely place. —Mark Webber
LE SILENCE EST EN MARCHE
Pierre-Yves Cruaud, France, 2001, colour, sound, 4 min
Barriers restrict the living space of more or less human apparitions. We witness the development of life forms that are already fairly regimented. —Pierre-Yves Cruaud
JET
Michaela Schwentner, Austria, 2003, colour, sound, 6 min
This video’s exhilarating dynamism results from a precisely composed interplay of colour and form which structures the viewer’s perception of it significantly. Michaela Schwentner’s work method closely resembles that of electro-acoustic sound artists Radian, who employ a variety of painterly elements that are allowed to interact, overlap or contrast. —Christa Benzer
WHY RE-MIX, 2002
Keiichi Tanaami, Japan, 2002, colour, sound, 10 min
Footage of a boxing match is reduced to printed stills, whose constituent dots are enlarged and contrasted into an optical moiré. Audio-visual barrage of sound and image by Japanese animator , graphic designer Tanaami, based on his 1975 film Why. Assault not insult. —Mark Webber
ANAL MASTURBATION & OBJECT LOSS
Steve Reinke, USA, 2002, colour, sound, 6 min
Ever on the lookout for learning opportunities, Reinke envisions an art institute where you don’t have to make anything, and with a library full of books glued together. All the information’s there – you just don’t have to bother reading it! —New York Video Festival, 2002
FORBIDDEN FRUITS
George Kuchar, USA, 2002, colour, sound, 15 min
The foliage and sprouting of urban greenery becomes the subject of this celebration to all things pollinated. The video explores hidden gardens that lie sequestered amid an array of dwellings inhabited by the not so rich and famous. Felines creep amid the blossoms as human entities enrich the soil with their leaking desires. —George Kuchar
THE GEOSOPHIST’S TEARS
Peter Rose, USA, 2002, colour, sound, 8 min
Shot during a seven-week cross-country road trip in the aftermath of September 11th, the work is operatic in ambition and offers a complex meditation on the iconography of the American landscape. Drawing on the stratagems of the early geosophists, who believed that through the operation of a mysterious instrument landscapes might be placed in an emotionally meaningful correspondence with one another, the work uses a variety of visual algorithms to propose and discover surprising structural features of the uninhabited American landscape. Sounds for the work were produced by a remarkable antique slide rule, dating from 1895, that was untouched for over forty years and whose peculiar threnody is both mournful and rhapsodic. In its fractured and phantasmagoric reworkings of the horizon, the work offers us unstable metaphors for the state of the union and a respectful homage to the traditions of painting. —Peter Rose
FRANZ UND KLARA
Gerhard Geiger, Germany, 2003, colour, sound, 4 min
Geiger seeks an equivalent editing style for digital video, to those techniques he has used for 16mm film. Using the same footage shot at a family house party, he presents first the concentrated short film (twice for our assimilation) and then the more recent video version. —Mark Webber
MARVELOUS CREATURES
Wago Kreider, USA, 2003, colour, sound, 3 min
From the taxidermied bestiary of a natural history museum to the life-like waxworks that haunt our pop culture memories, the convulsive beauty of animals oscillates between plenitude and punishment, attraction and repulsion, life and death. In a series of photographic shocks that flash an image of the fixed-explosive, Marvelous Creatures signal the uncanny correlation of erotic and destructive impulses. They bear witness to a primordial trauma, a confusion between the animate and the inanimate, the biological and the mechanical, Eros and Thanatos. —Wago Kreider
THE STAIRWAY AT ST. PAUL’S
Jeroen Offerman, Netherlands-UK, 2002, colour, sound, 9 min
It’s time to dive into your record collection and find out if it was all true. But first let us watch this video. Turn up the volume and remember the first time you smoked a cigarette… —Jeroen Offerman
5%
Tony Cokes & Scott Pagano, USA, 2001, colour, sound, 10 min
5% is a ten-minute work that questions the cult of pop stardom, deconstructs music industry practices, considers the problematics of live performance, and suggests other, more anonymous working strategies. For this work I decided to collaborate closely with musician, media artist, and designer Scott Pagano who, along with Marc Pierson, currently form the core of SWIPE. Our idea of generic music came out of a belief that pop music was more about life under post-industrial commodity capital than it was about ‘love’, ‘emotion’ or ‘personal expression’. Narratives of superstardom were the grease that kept the idiotic grind looped, moving in place. The soundtrack is two recent SWIPE tracks: “mm_2” and “1cc_v2+”. —Tony Cokes
I AM A BOYBAND
Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, Canada, 2002, colour, sound, 6 min
What are the ingredients for a boy band? A cute tune, dance moves and of course four handsome hunks, each with their own look … A cloned boyband co-opts an Elizabethan madigral to express its heartbreak over lost love. —Benny Nerofsky Ramsay
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