Date: 12 November 2010 | Season: Films of the Sea
FILMS OF THE SEA: 2
Friday 12 November 2010, at 8pm
Naples Fondazione Morra
In all of the arts, the ocean has been a constant source of inspiration, from Hokusai to JMW Turner, or from ‘Moby Dick’ to ‘Titanic’. As an emblem of endless possibilities, it might lead to discovery or tragedy, new lives or lives lost. These seven films are ‘of the sea’ in that they draw inspiration from it, but they are far from straightforward depictions. Peter Hutton, a former merchant seaman, has made many films of ships and seascapes. His most recent and most celebrated is At Sea, which traces the life cycle of massive container ships. David Gatten made his abstract film without a camera, by submerging unexposed lengths of film in the ocean. The second programme seeks out narrative through tall tales and maritime folklore. Slipping between dreams and reality, it includes the surreal (Maya Deren), the erotic (Matthias Müller) and childhood fantasy (Janie Geiser). Mati Diop follows a stowaway from Africa to Europe, and Rebecca Meyers explores the perils of seafaring off the American coast. “What the sea wants, the sea will have.”
Maya Deren, At Land, USA, 1944, 14 min
Matthias Müller, Sleepy Haven, Germany, 1993, 14 min
Janie Geiser, Kindless Villain, USA, 2010, 4 min
Mati Diop, Atlantiques, France/Senegal, 2009, 15 min
Rebecca Meyers, Blue Mantle, USA, 2010, 35 min
Curated by Mark Webber for the Independent Film Show 10th Edition
PROGRAMME NOTES
AT LAND
Maya Deren
1944, USA, 16mm, black and white, sound, 14 min
“In At Land, a woman (Deren) emerges from the ocean and infiltrates various social situations, including a dinner party and a chess game on the beach. Her emergence and ensuing sojourns among jarring geographies highlight the film’s key device – editing. The film casts the protagonist adrift in hostile social and natural environments but provides the character with the means to survive the inhospitable worlds she navigates – a multiplication of herself that produces sameness and difference. At Land is Deren’s least personal yet most individualistic film – ignored by many characters in the film, the protagonist is recognised and affirmed only by increasingly abstract, depersonalised, and spatially displaced versions of herself.” (Maria Pramaggiore)
Sleepy Haven
Matthias Müller
1993, Germany, 16mm, colour, sound, 14 min
“Sleepy Haven’s mottled, fissured surfaces resemble nothing so much as a body, its solarized apertures imparting a hallucinatory beauty which threatens always to break apart entirely, the skin of its material support pitilessly stretched across their fantastical recline. Asleep, the bodies offer themselves up to the gaze of the beholder, the film’s daydream structure suggesting that their minds are elsewhere, drifted far from these emptied tissues and ligaments, the better to offer themselves as vehicles of fantasy and projection. The long dream of the image world, depicted here as a reverie in stasis, a sleepy haven, is both conjured and deconstructed, made to reveal the stress fractures which result when the aims of everyday life are made to rub up against the dream factory.” (Mike Hoolboom)
Kindless Villain
Janie Geiser
2010, USA, video, black and white, 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)
Atlantiques
Mati Diop
2009, France/Senegal, video, colour, sound, 15 min
“Sitting by the campfire, a boy from Dakar named Serigne tells his two friends the story of his sea voyage as a stowaway. Not only he, but everyone in his surroundings seems to be continually obsessed by the idea of trying to cross the sea. His words reverberate like a melancholy poem. A story about boys who are continually travelling: between past, present and future, between life and death, history and myth.” (Mati Diop)
Blue Mantle
Rebecca Meyers
2010, USA, 16mm, colour, sound, 35 min
“Blending 19th century American literature with factual accounts, illustrations and music by Debussy and Wagner, this oblique portrait of a shipwrecked coastline conveys the vastness and majesty of the ocean. A song to the sea, and a commemoration of those who have risked their lives off the treacherous Massachusetts shore.” (Mark Webber)
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