Date: 24 October 2010 | Season: London Film Festival 2010 | Tags: London Film Festival
PEOPLE GOING NOWHERE
Sunday 24 October 2010, at 9pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3
Richard Kerr, De Mouvement, Canada, 2009, 7 min
Kerr’s mind-bending trip through the wipes and dissolves of old feature films is an exhilarating demonstration of the power of cinema.
Ben Rivers & Paul Harnden, May Tomorrow Shine The Brightest Of All Your Many Days As It Will Be Your Last, UK, 2009, 13 min
Female Japanese cadets patrol the woods and countryside where old men channel Futurist poets. Adjacent yes, but simultaneous?
Neil Beloufa, Brune Renault, France, 2009, 17 min
An abandoned car park is no substitute for the open road. Four characters find themselves in a looped fiction, replete with clichés, acting out cycles of heightened emotions. Like all teenagers, they think the world revolves around them – and in this film it almost does.
Victor Alimpiev, Vot, Russia, 2010, 5 min
As if suspended in limbo, or perhaps deep in rehearsal, five performers exchange glances, gestures and utter strange sounds.
Janie Geiser, Kindless Villain, USA, 2010, 4 min
Two boys seem trapped inside their own imaginations, dreaming of naval battles and Egyptian exotica.
Peter Tscherkassky, Coming Attractions, Austria, 2010, 24 min
With humour and materialist dynamics, Tscherkassky explores the direct relationship between actor, camera and audience. A meditation on the ‘cinema of attractions’; exploiting leftovers from the commercial industry to collide the intersecting forms of early film and the avant-garde.
Also Screening: Thursday 21 October 2010, at 2pm, NFT3
PROGRAMME NOTES
PEOPLE GOING NOWHERE
Sunday 24 October 2010, at 9pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3
DE MOUVEMENT
Richard Kerr, Canada, 2009, 35mm, b/w, sound, 7 min
As an extension of his Industrie / Industry project, Richard Kerr furthers his appropriation of feature film trailers, formally reconstructing their cinematic language. Monochromatic French film trailers from a bygone era provide the source material, and here the actions of the actors are secondary to the physical movement of celluloid.
A brilliant formalist montage of wipes creates an awareness of film motion and rhythm. (Andréa Picard)
MAY TOMORROW SHINE THE BRIGHTEST OF ALL YOUR MANY DAYS AS IT WILL BE YOUR LAST
Ben Rivers & Paul Harnden, UK, 2009, 16mm, b/w, sound, 13 min
Somewhere in the backwoods at the turn of I’m not sure which century, a crack unit of female Japanese soldiers track a group of lost, ancient desperadoes. They dig holes, they read, their leader channels the ghost of Italian sound poets (as yet unborn?), all the while moving onward … but who is searching for who and why? Hand-processed with a soundtrack cobbled together from Dictaphone recordings, old 78s,
hiss and scratches and whines. (Ben Rivers)
www.benrivers.com
BRUNE RENAULT
Neil Beloufa, France, 2009, video, colour, sound, 17 min
Brune Renault is a kind of looped fiction that happens in a car sliced in four parts resting on small wheels; basically a sculpture. Since we can open the car, we can make impossible camera shots, moving in and out of the object. The goal of the piece was to have this car cut in four parts to give the illusion of movement, which is a paradox. I wanted the sculpture to mutate into a functional object (real car), once viewers were starting to follow and ‘suspend disbelief’ for the fiction. And then, to lose the fiction and utilise video’s function to mutate into a document about the usual contemporary art sculpture. The impossible camera shots showing the cuts of the cars had to be the disturbing element that betray the fiction, but then again the power of fiction is hard to break down. (Neil Beloufa)
VOT
Victor Alimpiev, Russia, 2010, video, colour, sound, 5 min
Alimpiev’s videos focus directly on his characters while avoiding specific narrative – close-ups reveal intimate details and personal expressions; moments of awkwardness or tension becoming magnified. Repeated gestures, passing through the group as one, are imbued with new, fugitive meaning. Meticulously staged, the videos trace the simplest of movements heightened to form a collective ritual. Group identity is further emphasised not only by carefully controlled actions and sound, but also through a uniformity of pale tones and muted colours. (Ikon Gallery, Birmingham)
KINDLESS VILLAIN
Janie Geiser, USA, 2010, video, colour, sound, 4 min
In Kindless Villain, two boys wander through a stone fortress, while battles wage in the waters beyond. Seemingly alone in their island world, they succumb to fatigue and to boys’ games of power. Scratched phrases from an ancient recording of Hamlet surface, including a sad cry for vengeance. War is a child’s game, played quietly in this forgotten world. (Janie Geiser)
www.janiegeiser.com
COMING ATTRACTIONS
Peter Tscherkassky, Austria, 2010, 35mm, b/w, sound, 24 min
Coming Attractions and the construction of its images are woven around the idea that there is a deep, underlying relationship between early cinema and avant-garde film. Tom Gunning was among the first to describe and investigate this notion in a systematic and methodical manner in his well known and often quoted essay: ‘An Unseen Energy Swallows Space: The Space in Early Film and Its Relation to American Avant-Garde Film’ (in: John L. Fell [ed.], ‘Film Before Griffith’, Berkeley 1983). Coming Attractions additionally addresses Gunning’s concept of a ‘Cinema of Attractions’. This term is used to describe a completely different relation between actor, camera and audience to be found in early cinema in general, as compared to the ‘modern cinema’ which developed after 1910, gradually leading to the narrative technique of D.W. Griffith. The notion of a ‘Cinema of Attractions’ touches upon the exhibitionistic character of early film, the undaunted show and tell of its creative possibilities, and its direct addressing of the audience. At some point it occurred to me that another residue of the cinema of attractions lies within the genre of advertising: here we also often encounter a uniquely direct relation between actor, camera and audience. The impetus for Coming Attractions was to bring the three together: commercials, early cinema, and avant-garde film. (Peter Tscherkassky)
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