Date: 24 October 2009 | Season: London Film Festival 2009 | Tags: London Film Festival
HUMAN NATURE
Saturday 24 October 2009, at 7pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3
Friedl vom Gröller, Passage Briare, Austria, 2009, 3 min
A meeting of friends in a Paris backstreet, and an unexpected revelation.
Josef Dabernig, Hotel Roccalba, Austria, 2009, 10 min
In a subtle choreography, the occupants of a small Alpine hotel pass a lazy afternoon. Not much happens, but all may not be as it appears.
Jana Debus, Gregor Alexis, Germany, 2008, 20 min
The filmmaker’s schizophrenic brother recounts personal experiences, slipping between first and third person. The locations chosen for this portrait – a desolate apartment and a wasteland littered with abandoned machinery – are indicative of the condition of someone potentially as vulnerable as the insects that collect on his windowsill.
Ken Jacobs, The Discovery, USA, 2008, 4 min
Tom’s dextrous parlour game attracts unwanted attention. A stolen moment, frozen in time, now re-animated for all to see.
Jim Trainor, The Presentation Theme, USA, 2008, 14 min
As primitive Magic Marker drawings illustrate the myths and rituals of the ancient Moche civilisation, a disparaging narrator describes the tormented trials of a hapless creature amongst goblets of blood, fanged men and a sacrificial priestess.
Mara Mattuska & Chris Haring, Burning Palace, Austria, 2009, 32 min
This new collaboration between Mattuschka and Vienna’s Liquid Loft takes us behind the velvet curtains of the Burning Palace, whose peculiar inhabitants have an itch they just can’t scratch.
PROGRAMME NOTES
HUMAN NATURE
Saturday 24 October 2009, at 7pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3
PASSAGE BRIARE
Friedl vom Gröller, Austria, 2009, 16mm, b/w, silent, 3 min
A woman, a man, a smile. They sit in the sun, and what links them is the film’s real surprise: a matter-of-fact gesture which is probably taboo for others. It’s up to the film itself to reveal what this gesture is. The anarchic humour of Passage Briare liberates the viewer for a brief, beautiful moment from the fear of getting old. (Maya McKechneay)
HOTEL ROCCALBA
Josef Dabernig, Austria, 2009, 35mm, b/w, sound, 10 min
Apparently over two years in the making (the artist displayed the script in a gallery exhibition in 2007, with suitably structural/conceptual directorial commentary), Hotel Roccalba is a small wonder, the sort of film that somehow manages to astonish with its precision while at the same time allowing enough basic human breathing room to permit limitless discovery. Like the best formalist efforts – Gerhard Richter paintings, Anton Webern compositions – you can naturally learn Dabernig’s film by heart because it does observe a kind of schematic organization. But it continues to unfold, with a warm, enveloping humour all the same. What really defines Hotel Roccalba is a bizarre, thrilling sense of the disorganized, random stuff of life being invisibly, imperceptibly choreographed; a God-like aspect that is gradually revealed, becoming a kind of Cubist hysteria. (Michael Sickinski)
GREGOR ALEXIS
Jana Debus, Germany, 2008, video, colour, sound, 20 min
An empty house. Beautiful, unobtrusive, rapt images of a demolished landscape. A cautious but moving documentary portrait of the director’s schizophrenic brother. (Kunstfilm Biennale, Cologne)
THE DISCOVERY
Ken Jacobs, USA, 2008, video, colour, silent, 4 min
She thought Tom was alone. Have we people been just as we are for centuries and centuries? With no essential changes beyond our slang?(Ken Jacobs)
THE PRESENTATION THEME
Jim Trainor, USA, 2008, 16mm, b/w, sound, 14 min
The Presentation Theme is based on something very specific. This is not explicit in the film itself, which is elusive on that score – although I would like the audience to have the feeling that there is something ‘real’ at the core of it. Or, to put it another way, that they would suspect, through the specificity of the references, that the filmmaker didn’t just make everything up himself. I got the idea from certain archaeology books, which describe an ancient Peruvian culture called the Moche. They existed long before the Inca, around 100 to 800 AD, then disappeared. They left a lot of pottery behind, and some of the pottery is moulded into shapes of supernatural figures, rulers, animals, narrative scenes; and other pottery is plain in shape but is covered in painting – specifically cartoonish-looking figures, again enacting mythological themes. All of the art is quite mysterious, as there is no-one to interpret it for us (and no written language, of course). The moulded pottery often has erotic themes and the painted pottery often has themes of warfare and human sacrifice. ‘The Presentation Theme’ in Moche archaeology refers to the human sacrifice narrative, in which the priests and priestesses are ultimately presented with goblets of victims’ blood. (Jim Trainor)
BURNING PALACE
Mara Mattuska & Chris Haring, Austria, 2009, video, colour, sound, 32 min
Austrian filmmaker Mara Mattuschka has already worked with choreographer Chris Haring several times before and has transferred the dance performances created by him and his company ‘liquid loft’ into experimental films. After Legal Errorist (2005), Part Time Heroes (2007) and Running Sushi (2008) Mattuschka committed herself to Chris Haring’s choreographic trilogy ‘Posing Project’ and made a film called Burning Palace out of the second, award-winning part ‘The Art of Seduction’. Five dancers journey through the emotions of Eros, in reality and in the imagination, in mythology and in the present day. Accompanied by strange-seeming sound collages, they stray through the labyrinthine corridors of the ‘Burning Palace’ hotel. An ecstatic, melancholy epic of the tension that ensures survival and makes the Earth move. (www.impulstanz.com)
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