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Filmmakers in residence

Filmmaker
Year
2024
LA CITADELLE DES CLOWNS by Lucie LESZEZ

Set against the brutal architecture of a dystopian universe, a silhouette subjected to metamorphoses confronts the lines. A voice suggests madness. Language goes off the rails. LA CITADELLE DES CLOWNS is a portrait, a film journal, an epileptic crossing of an ambushed bridge. How to get out of the citadel?

Lucie Leszez (1994) is a filmmaker and researcher. She is a member of the artist-run film laboratories MTK and L'Abominable and the film magazine Revue Documentaires.

WAIT FOR ME IN OBLIVION by Sergei PROKOFIEV

This film explores coping mechanisms, dynamic memory, and forgetting in the face of catastrophic events. 217 sheets of paper with graphite prints become frames for eight short videos. This is not simply a graphic series, but a transformational process. The static sculpture that shares the three-dimensional space with us must begin its movement. After combustion, physical objects become memories of themselves. And in a series of prints/frames, they sink into oblivion.

Sergei Prokofiev was born in 1983 in Moscow and currently lives and works in Paris. In 2013 he graduated from the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Moscow. In 2014, he became a finalist in the international competition "Center - Periphery" (Italy). In 2021, he received the Second Prize of the "Zverev Art Prize" (Moscow). In 2022, he received the Charlottenborg Spring Exhibition Solo Award (Denmark). In mid-2022, he became an artist in exile because of his stance against Russia's full-scale military invasion of Ukraine. He has curated and participated in exhibitions in Russia, Italy, Austria, Sweden, Hungary, Poland, Norway, Denmark, and France. His current work includes graphics, sculpture, installation, performance, and video.

MILLS OF TIME by Pauline RIGAL

On the wild banks of a Cévennes river, Philip and Tristan restore the irrigation system of a 17th-century water mill. Following the water's path, they work together, pausing, resting, and sharing moments of calm.

Born in 1991, Pauline Rigal makes films that explore both the physical properties of filmic motion and visions related to the earth's mineral qualities and nature as the birthplace of images. Between a certain documentary lyricism blending landscapes and time through the medium of photochemical film, and fable-like narratives, Pauline Rigal's films sculpt luminous imprints. In 2018, she co-founded the cinema magazine Les Saisons, which is dedicated to film writing practices. She has published writings by Tacita Dean, Robert Gardner, Lav Diaz, Sharon Lockhart, Deborah Stratman, Helga Fanderl, and many others. In 2023, she directed Mills of Time, produced by Gaëlle Jones, Perspective Films.

ASTRES ET DÉSASTRES by Olivier FOUCHARD

Anthropocenes, magic mountains, earthquakes... Cosmic events in the multiverse and a certain vision that we have of the universe, of Gaia (Earth), of the Moon in the style of Méliès, of the solar system, of stars, of fireballs during stormy weather, of Betelgeuse exploding, and of eruptions on a sacred mountain...

"Planets and Exoplanets", "Nebulae" and other "Galaxies" and "Stars" painted through stencils directly onto the film strip, itself submitted to various chemical treatments. The filmmaker takes on the role of an active, contemplative thinker who delivers a reflection on space-time...

Olivier Fouchard (Troyes, 1969) calls himself a "weaver", but he is also a painter, filmmaker, and video artist. In a relentless artistic exploration, his cinematographic work revolves around the articulation between ethical rigor and unbridled formal freedom.

RED EARTH BLACK EARTH by Agnès Perrais

Four motifs of an insular landscape: dunes, grass, stormy skies, sea. These motifs are inflected and intertwined through various photochemical operations: successive printing generations, flat printing, bipacking, and chemical toning; unsettling the steady, desolate shots to create an imaginary landscape where elements and matter meet.

Agnès Perrais (Paris, 1987) is a member of artist-run film laboratories L'Etna and L'Abominable/Navire Argo. As part of a varied artistic practice (including collage and rayograms), she develops her cinematographic work at the intersection between the political and the imaginary, working with both documentary and short experimental forms.

ALICIA by Juana ROBLES

Originally shot on Super 8mm film and partially blown up to 16mm for the creation of collages made up of abstract and composed photograms, the film explores in a medium-specific way the self-experimental search for artistic, gender and sexual identity of movement artist Toma Alice Péronnet.

The connection between art and daily life, as well as the game between egocentrism and self-distance, characterise Toma Alice Péronnet's artistic work. They use their body as dispositive — a medium available for transformation in order to explore their sexual ambivalence and polyvalence treating gender and sex as a constant changing performative act. Toma Alice Péronnet converts the public space into a "stage of living art” for spontaneous interactions.

The composer of the film is Darja Kazimira.

Juana Robles (b. Tortosa, Spain 1983) is an experimental filmmaker based in Kilkenny, Ireland. Her work is focused on analogue filmmaking and the use of everyday and poetic documentations to capture intimate events, when collaborating mostly with outsiders and artists with unconventional trajectories. She's interested in using the materiality of analogue film together with experimental and process-based methods to dissolve the medium in order to highlight alternative ways of seeing and experiencing, while also letting aspects of the subconscious come to the surface.

2023
XANAT by Lalita BLISS

A modern and mythical celebration of the Divine Feminine, inspired by the Mexican myth of Xanat, the rebel princess who defied her father’s orders to be with her poet musician lover. Murdered together for eloping, their mingled blood creates the first vanilla orchid, and with it, the birth of a fully embodied woman who becomes conscious of herself. This Super 8 film joyfully celebrates femininity, presenting a sensual journey through different forms and experiences. XANAT is deep, tangible and radical. This is very much an embodied film, both in form and in process, and entirely hand-developed and hand-edited. The soundtrack is made by the filmmaker, her partner, and their children.

Lalita Bliss is a filmmaker working with mostly Super 8 film. Born in the UK, she has lived in Germany, Australia, Portugal and Iceland. She is fascinated by generating synaesthetic experience through artist cinema and has had her work shown globally at festivals and galleries, and completed a residency at LIFT in Toronto. She runs Nectarella, the home of her creative offerings that support the embodied blissful experience of being alive.

THIS IS NOT (A) CINEMA: MAGICAL END by Kira ADIBEKOV

THIS IS NOT (A) CINEMA : MAGICAL END is a continuation of an artistic and curatorial project begun in 2019 and presented, among others, at the University of Roehampton and Whitechapel Gallery (London). It is an attempt to reimagine the changing contours of experimental cinema and artists' films, as well as the means of their exhibition.

Images and sounds for MAGICAL END have been captured during the residency at Light Cone/Atelier 105 in October-November 2023, with the support of the French Institute. It also contains fragments from other works which are recycled through MiniDV, in order to allow to see and hear the 19th arrondissement of Paris (where Light Cone is located) through original and borrowed images, without necessarily having to choose between the curatorial and the artistic.

Kira Adibekov, born in Moscow, is a curator and artist of Armenian origin based in London. He launched the GES-2 cultural center, organized a retrospective of Peter Nestler, Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, and was jury member at the Berlinale Forum. His experimental films have been shown at goEast Film Festival, Cottbus Film Festival, and at IFFR. He is a former student of Chevening, a holder of Global Talent (UK), and Passeport-talent (International Recognition) in France.

ELNA IN MOTION de Jean-Michel Bouhours

The need to analyze the locomotion of living beings is closely linked with the invention of cinema (Muybridge, Marey); in this film, it is brought into a phantasmagoric and poetic dimension. In its first years, the child discovers the pleasure of moving its body through space, developing its kinaesthetic senses on the swing: the sensation of ascent and descent, drawing nearer and farther, in a joyful jubilation of escaping the laws of gravity. Liberating her- or himself from immobility leads the child to experiment with solutions to achieve locomotion, culminating in the process of walking.

Over 400 drawings, collages, and paintings have been created from filmed sequences to create unique visual movement-images.

Jean-Michel Bouhours was born in 1956. After studying mathematics and physics, he went on to study cinema at Paris VIII University (Vincennes), in particular, with Guy Fihman and Claudine Eizykman. He was the first curator of the film department of the Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Pompidou. Since the mid-1970s, he has also made some thirty experimental films and art documentaries. His films are inspired by musical composition and structure, exploring the potential of film frames in relation to each other (what Werner Nekes termed kinê). A founding member of the Paris-Films-Coop in 1976, he distributes his films through Light Cone since the 1980s. His film RYTHMES 76 received the Special Jury Prize a the Festival du Jeune Cinéma of Toulon in 1976.

A ROLL FOR PETER (Collective film)

Not long after filmmaker Peter Hutton passed away in June 2016, colleagues Jennifer Reeves and Mark Street put out a call: shoot a 100-foot roll of 16mm black and white, thinking about Peter and his work in solitude. Process it. Submit it. They sequenced the three dozen submissions into movements of double and single projection, and screened the tribute in various cities in the United States and Europe.

A ROLL FOR PETER features a wide variety of approaches to filmmaking, from impeccable processing in commercial labs to splotchy development in buckets, unslit regular 8mm, single frame animation, full runs of spring-wound Bolexes. Subjects range from the urban or unspoiled landscapes that drew Hutton through abstraction to antiquarian texts and nothing but text. The memorial contains homages to specific scenes in Hutton’s oeuvre as well as unspoken, less direct tributes to Hutton as friend and mentor.

Contributors include: Dominic Angerame, Roddy Bogawa, Cassandra Bull, Jacob Burckhardt, Jesse Cain, David Gatten, Richard Max Gavrich, George Griffin, Eve Heller, Mott Hupfel, Nikolas Jaeger, Amanda Katz & Josh Lewis, Theodore Rex King, Robbie Land, rebecca (marks) leopold, Paul Marcus, Daryl Meador, Mary Beth Reed, Jennifer Reeves, Dave Rodriguez, Peter Rose, Lynne Sachs, Josephine Shokrian, Fern Silva & students, Jordan Stone, Mark Street, G. Anthony Svatek & Zachary Nichols, Eric Theise, Audrey Turner, Michael Wawzenek, Max Weinman & Jake Carl Magee, and Timoleon Wilkins.

GLORIA OF YOUR IMAGINATION by Jennifer REEVES

GLORIA OF YOUR IMAGINATION immerses viewers in the fraught life of a recently divorced 30-year-old mother, the culture and events of her formative years, and the bewildering world of the mid-1960s psychotherapy office. Reeves re-works and subverts the first psychotherapy training film to ever present full, genuine sessions (THREE APPROACHES TO PSYCHOTHERAPY, 1965) through multiple-projection, montage with other found films of the time, and by undoing the linear narrative of the psychotherapy session.

Reeves superimposes 16mm home movies from Gloria’s childhood and adolescence, newsreels, a brassiere commercial, a Miss America pageant, and educational films highlight the social conditions of the world and time of Gloria’s 30 years, acknowledged by only one of the therapists. The layered montage brings out the absurdity, humor, anger, and deep revelations that can come from baring one’s secrets to the experts.

Jennifer Reeves has made over 25 film works since 1990; from avant-garde shorts to expanded cinema performances and experimental features. Reeves’s work has shown extensively from the Berlin, Toronto, and Hong Kong Film Festivals to the Museum of Modern Art, universities, and microcinemas worldwide. Reeves’s acclaimed visceral and personal works immerse viewers in intricate, unfamiliar cinematic territory. Her work elucidates themes of mental health, feminism and sexuality and the natural world.

MATERIA VIBRANTE by Pablo MARÍN

In search of trails and footprints of an absence, this film focuses on the coexistence of nature and human made structures and artefacts to convey a formal object for remembrance. An obscure celebration of the surface of a world fractured and exhausted, this could be a city symphony but it feels more like a mausoleum for our present existence.

Pablo Marín is a filmmaker and writer. As an independent researcher and curator, he has presented programmes on Argentinean cinema in the United States, Canada, Spain, Austria, Finland and Switzerland. He has translated books by Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage and John Waters, among others, and his volume on Argentine experimental cinema, Una luz revelada. El cine experimental argentino, was published in both Argentina and Spain by La Vida Útil in 2022. His film Resistfilm (2014) won the best Avant-Garde Film at Filmadrid, and his latest, Trampa de luz (2021), was awarded the Principal Online Prize of the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen.

SPACE_INVADERS.EXE by Malaz USTA

Three refugees are asked questions concerning their life, (plans), and reasons for (their choices). Through the use of found footage, and gameplay, the film tries to communicate the feelings of the displaced, and the absurdity of such questions. A parody of misinformation, and an exploration of feelings of confusion, disorientation, and uncertainty, drawing from the personal memory of the filmmaker.

Malaz Usta is a filmmaker, designer and visual artist working with film, graphics, animation, editing, and sound. He was born in Damascus, in Syria. He studied TV, and Cinema in Istanbul, and he is currently a researcher at the Netherlands Film Academy. His works deal with different issues of displacement and ideas of belonging, identity, home. His first short film A Year in Exile (2020) premiered at Ji.hlava IDFF.

30 ANS APRÈS... by Françoise THOMAS

30 ANS APRÈS… (30 YEARS LATER…) is a frame-by-frame film in which the filmmaker animates emblematic objects related to the 16mm format (metal and plastic film cans, rust, wound and unwound films, reels...), which she used in the 1990s, and home movies stored and forgotten for 30 years. The film evokes the rediscovery of this footage: traces of instants of lives captured on celluloid from which they escape, reactivating memory.

Original 16mm footage was scanned, and the filmmaker was introduced to digital editing and post-production software at Light Cone, in order to rework these images herself: bridges and passages between generations and cinematographic tools… 30 years later.

Françoise Thomas, born in 1957, lives in Paris. After studies in physics, she joined the project of creating the Cité des sciences et de l’industrie (City of Science and Industry) in Paris in 1983 and went on to have a professional career in scientific museum equipment and museography. She has been a filmmaker-member of Light Cone since the early 1980s.

POSITIONS by Kaveh KAVOOSI

"My Positions result from the transformation caused by the encounter between matter and imagination. In this film, which is inspired by the cycle of nature through its four principal elements (water, wind, earth and fire), existence follows non-existence and vice versa, and worlds succeed each other. With the help of music, which is perfectly tailored to the film's evolution and further articulates its meaning, the audience is immersed from beginning to end, in one event after another, thus hearing a complete symphony. The notes or frequencies of these compositions are interpreted by algorithms, which generate an evolving and organic film, a sort of matter in motion. My goal is to show the movement of matter through space, as well as its changes and transformations caused by the spatiotemporal context. I leave the interpretation open to audiences with different points of view."

Kaveh Kavoosi is a visual artist who holds a DNSEP diploma from the European Academy of Art in Brittany (France), hailing from Iran.

CÉNOTAPHE by Charles CADIC

An acoustic installation - sound speakers placed on a beach - replaces the ocean which has disappeared. The sound of waves once heard there is broadcast by the speakers in an infinite loop. The sea, digitized, amplified, has become a saturated wave, a data flow, an emitting signal.

Charles Cadic, born in 1991, has received a diploma from La Cambre, Brussels, Urban Space section (2013) and from the Beaux-Arts in Paris (2018). He has also studied at the Glasgow School of Art (in Environmental Art). His practice is located at the intersection of sculpture, video, and installation but also photography, action in public space, architecture, and sound.

2022
THE OASIS I DESERVE by Inès SIEULLE

The Oasis I Deserve is an experimental documentary short film that explores the emergence of the conversational robot Replika, an online discussion platform that allows to converse with an artificial intelligence over the phone. An intimate journey from the AI's point of view, The Oasis I Deserve questions our way of dealing with the arrival of artificial intelligence into our world and the trouble it generates.

Inès Sieulle is a French artist and film director. She studied at the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs of Paris and the Fresnoy - Studio national des arts contemporains. She directed Murmurent les rivages in 2019, a virtual reality experiment that deals with the idea of solitude, based on discussions collected in internet forums. Her work aims to bring to light the contemporary social dynamics that surround her.

EL SIGNO VACÍO by Kathryn RAMEY

Using educational, touristic and military media/artifacts from the United States alongside contemporary voices, images and sounds from Puerto Rico, EL SIGNO VACÍO (the empty sign) is a feature-length cinematic essay interrogating the 123-year US occupation of Puerto Rico to reveal how US democratic narratives effectively obscure her capitalist/military domination.

Kathryn Ramey is a Boston-based filmmaker and anthropologist whose work operates at the intersection of experimental film processes and ethnographic research. Most recently she has been focused on creating an anti-colonial film practice with collaborators in Puerto Rico and researching environmentally friendly photochemical processes utilizing indigenous flora. She is deeply committed to sharing her knowledge of alternative analogue technologies through workshops and publications.

SIMILITUDES by Roger VILDER

"Two sources have always guided my research: my insatiable curiosity and an assiduous sense of observation of natural phenomena that I have witnessed. This is what has brought me to create SIMILITUDE in the context of Light Cone's Atelier 105, for which I am grateful."

Roger Vilder, French-Canadian, born in 1938, began showing his work in the second half of the 1960s in the best galleries in New York, Montreal and Toronto, immediately taking part in major international events that marked the history of kinetic art, such as the one at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1970 entitled Kinetics. His works, all based on the use of movement and its representation, are reliefs that use electric motors and industrial equipment, mainly articulated chains and springs, to compose abstract works in constant transformation that evolve from geometric structure to organic form. (Source: La Patinoire Royale | Galerie Valerie Bach)

FIÑE by Manuela DE LABORDE

"In what was my third visit to La Havana and initially a trip commissioned to experimentally register the making of a public sculpture, I found myself walking while waiting. Waiting, together with the main artists, to know if the making of the piece would even take place while some permits were on hold. Uncertainty and my limited time there, a little over a month, uncoupled the works. I found myself walking, revisiting, but also filming. Filming mostly the neighborhood in which we stayed: El Vedado - Calle 9 between L and J, Parque de los suspiros… Ascending and descending numbers and letters, bumping and u-turning at the Malecon, Alemendares River, or Zapata. My own sort of Magna Doodle* drawing with the district. Doubling paths again and again, each time with new play… asked to record a race, a domino game, a dance made up of some local gestures a friend taught me. Doubling paths with faces, sites, trees, cats that would start to become familiar. Doubling paths with my own memories of having been there as a child, as a teen… Coppelia again and again, eat ice cream, sit in the park, now with wifi. It is and it isn’t a film of Havana; somehow it can and can’t be a film of Havana, in the same way a stroll is and isn’t just walking."
 
* magnetic drawing toy

Manuela de Laborde's art and cinema practice meditates upon the materiality of things right up to their possible virtuality, is composed of minimalist works inspired by simplicity of expression, the economy of proposals and the place of exhibition. 
In 2021, Laborde had her first retrospective at DocumentaMadrid and was previously artist-in-residence at the Tamayo Museum with her educational project -ito/-ita, as well as a resident at LIFT (Link of Independent Filmmakers in Toronto, CA) and of the International Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen - Conditional Cinema Program (2018-2022), for which she produced her film Ficciones, recently presented at the New York Film Festival (NYFF) and the BFI London Film Festival. Her thesis film, AS WITHOUT SO WITHIN, was selected by more than 20 festivals, among them: MoMA + FSLC, the 20th Sesc_ Videobrasil Contemporary Art Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and Rotterdam International Film Festival. In 2019, she presented, together with Jenny Berger Myhre, the piece Notes and notes and notes... at Casa de Lago, CDMX, and Borealis Festival for Experimental Music.

Laborde studied Tapestry/Intermedia at the Edinburgh College of Art and received an MFA in Film and Video from the California Institute of the Arts. Between studies, she had her solo exhibition, "Maquettes", at Generator Projects - Dundee.

DAUCUS BUGANVILIA by Florencia Aliberti

DAUCUS BUGANVILIA is a collection of natural elements in direct contact with the film strip. Lichen, woodland plants, dried petals and found leaves interact with the photochemical medium in a cameraless film experiment that uncovers the constitution of matter on the minute level. A rhythmic visual study in which vegetal patterns, textures and sensations follow one other, revealing nature in its most imperceptible detail.

Florencia Aliberti (Buenos Aires, 1986) is a film director and editor working in documentary and experimental cinema.

CINEXPÉRIMENTAUX: ALAIN MAZARS by Frédérique Devaux & Michel Amarger

Cinexpérimentaux is a series of monographic films on great authors – or important sites – of experimental cinema. This new edition is dedicated to the protean body of work of Alain Mazars.

Born in 1955, this travelling filmmaker has made fiction, documentary and experimental films in various media, including Super 8, 16mm and digital video. He has directed films for television as well as completely independently, with friends, with strangers, with Chinese or Burmese actors, or with Jean-François Balmer and Alain Bashung.

He has been invited to prestigious venues like La Casa Velazquez. A number of his films have been shown at Cannes (in the Acid section which he has also passionately moderated) and at numerous big international festivals, where he has received many prizes. Due to his nomadic existence (in France, Spain, China, Myanmar, Laos...), the idea of voyage emerges naturally from his work, a leitmotiv that the filmmakers explore throughout the film.

Después de nada is a film journal of a disastrous journey in search of the experience of emptiness, from the Nepal Himalayas to their antipode in the Chilean Atacama Desert, between 2014 and 2015. The integrating and cumulating gaze, inherent to any voyage, is captured here in Super 8 footage, and just like the natural landscape, it resists any attempt of predetermination or uniformisation.

Over the course of this journey, a love story with a Nepalese citizen bears witness to the discrepancies in privilege between the nationalities, exposing the cracks in a system whose efficiency forgets that organic life is submitted to a state of non-programmable incertitude, the consequences of which result in life’s total helplessness. A system that neglects the experience of the true reality of bodies, projecting itself in a fictitious future, omitting the past and generating a preconceived and sanctioned experience; resolving the experience of life through abstract laws that anticipate events. Without taking into account that knowledge will always be limited by the brute fact of existence.

Using a fragmented aesthetic in the future perfect mode, the crisis of a linear and progressive conception of temporality becomes evident. A succession of failures emerges as the detotalising result of the determinist power of the real. Thus, the void: a limitless state, uncreated and admitting all possible forms; it implies accepting the downfall of ideals, the impossibility to represent and create discourses on the totality, such as Human Rights and their egalitarian and unalienable promise. The failure of this and other metanarratives of universalisation is replaced with partial narratives, embracing experimentation, uncertainty, indetermination and incompleteness. There are no absolute truths, only probabilities.

Carla Andrade, an artist working in photography, audiovisual media and installation, holds a Bachelor's degree in Audiovisual Communication and a Master’s degree in Artist’s Film & Moving Image from Goldsmiths University in London; she is also a student of philosophy. The intersection between visual expression media and a terrain that is closer to reflection and the world of ideas is one of the defining qualities of her work. She is currently based between Galicia, London and Rio de Janeiro. Her work has been exhibited in contemporary art centers such as the Guggenheim Museum of Bilbao, MARCO in Vigo, Tabacalera in Madrid, Caixaforum in Barcelona, La Casa Encendida, Le 104 in Paris and LUX in London; as well as international festivals of film and photography such as IFFR, Zinebi, PortoPostDoc, FICUNAM, Curtas Vila do Conde, EXiS Festival, Curtocircuito, L’Alternativa, (S8) and PhotoEspaña, among others.

EL CHINERO by Bani KHOSHNOUDI

El Chinero is a rugged hill in the desert, 140 km south of Mexicali in the Baja California region of Mexico. Nobody knows since when it bears its name, but everyone has heard of a tragic episode that took place here in 1916… Or were there many such episodes? A few years after the Mexican Revolution of 1910, a massive exodus took place within the country, as deportations and violence targeted Chinese and Asian migrants who had settled in Mexico for many decades. Despite a lack of documentation about the site, it is thought that many people died here while crossing the desert from mainland Mexico. Myth and identity, reality and fiction, ghosts and memory. El Chinero can in some way be seen as a monument to the memory of these forgotten, anonymous people while not officially being one. A site of tragedy with no traces nor remnants to be seen. How can one fill this memory void with images and artifacts in an attempt to construct an archive where none exists?

Born in Tehran, Iran, Bani Khoshnoudi grew up in the United States where she studied architecture, photography and film at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a filmmaker and visual artist whose work explores ideas of displacement, history of exile, violence, revolt and collective memory. In 2008, Bani was invited to the prestigious Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program in New York City. There she developed work in the form of video and sound installations, exploring the concept of the archive. Her work has been shown in museums and art centers like the Centre Pompidou, Fondation Cartier and Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, Serralves Foundation in Porto, and the Contemporary Art Museum of Zagreb. Her essay film, THE SILENT MAJORITY SPEAKS, was named one of the 10 essential films by French curator Nicole Benez and was included in the exhibit and book project Uprisings by French philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman for the Jeu de Paume Museum.

STALK by Ericka Beckman

STALK is a 23-minute experimental single screen film created from the elements of an October 2021 NYC Performa Biennial commission. Adapted from the fairytale Jack and the Beanstalk, STALK is a critique of corporate farming using GMO seeds and the effects of economic pressure on a small independent farming community. It features vocal work, performers and stop motion animation. STALK was shot in 16mm film, transferred to HD and edited on Avid Media Composer 8.5.

Described as a key figure of the Pictures Generation, in her work Ericka Beckman investigates how individuals shape their self-image based on outside influencers during an age of mass media. Her films and installations use color, sound and movement to examine cultural signs and subjectivity, particularly with regard to labor, leisure and gender.

THE INFINITE SUNDOWN / SUN II: EARTH by Luis Macías

Sundown is the precise instant corresponding to the disappearance of the sun on the hypothetical horizon. An infinite loop that becomes a ritual of initiation for the celebration of a new perception. An endless ending, which prepares us for the arrival of a new sun.

Second film of the SIXTH SUN project. Shot in the Sonora Desert, Mexico, and inspired by the pre-Hispanic myth of the Sixth Sun.

Luis Macías is an artist, filmmaker and moving-image composer. His pieces deal with the formal and spectral properties of the moving image, through the exploration of the cinematographic device itself and the photochemical nature of the medium. Co-founder and active member of CRATER-Lab, an independent artist-run-film lab for analog cinema.

RELAX BE CRUEL by Marion Scemama

Filmed in 1983 in New York at Pier 34, this film takes place at an abandoned storehouse which was left at the mercy of the elements and open to anonymous homosexual encounters and to having its walls covered with gigantic frescos by underground artists.
This place breathed transgression, desire, danger.
Shot on black & white 16mm film with an Äaton camera, the film tells the story of a marginal homeless punk woman, a would-be artist who squats in the storehouse. It depicts chance encounters with other marginal characters, each more broke than the last, and intriguing sexual scenes witnessed by the main character. Shot within the gaping spaces of industrial ruins cradled by the lapping waters of the Hudson, at the feet of the extravagant World Trade Center towers, this film is the only surviving document of the Pier. Demolished soon after, this cathedral-like place has become, over the years, an emblem of the exhuberance of the underground 1980s scene, the last space of freedom before the Aids era.
Through the years and life's surprises, such as a fire, the negatives and the workprint of this film have been altered or lost. This new edit has been made using the sound recordings, chutes and unused rushes left from that time, giving free rein to reflection: what to do with what one has? A fundamental question, in life and in art...

Directed by Marion Scemama, edited by François Pain, sound design by François Marcelly-Fernandez.

Marion Scemama is a Paris-based photographer and filmmaker. She lived in New York from 1981 to 1986. There, she met the artist David Wojnarowicz, with whom she collaborated on a number of videos and photo series. In 2018, she directed a documentary essay film on David Wojnarowicz for the latter's retrospective held at the Whitney Museum. This film was selected for the Berlinale in 2019, where it was nominated for Best Documentary, and was subsequently shown at various museums (Reina Sofia, Mudam, Musée du Jeu de Paume), institutions and American and European festivals. Marion Scemama is represented in Paris by New Galérie.

TEMPS DENSE by Kôichi Nabeshima

TEMPS DENSE is a series of projects that explore a certain method on human perception by suscitating the movement of light and its effects on the image; it accentuates the fact of seeing as an action of understanding existence by way of the black screen. The light gliding on the contours of objects shows us a spontaneous moment of projection and representation, where the delimitation between Nature and human society is evoked, the difference of their "histories", between vegetal organization and architectural formation. The basis of this creation is the analysis of continuity and discontinuity in filmic temporality, inasmuch as the latter can be a point of view on the Universe through its cutting up of everyday life.

Kôichi Nabeshima is an audiovisual artist who resides in a studio in the Parisian suburbs. He is interested in the concept of art as it is analysed by the phenominist idea and the interactive relationship between Nature and Humanity.

GROW UP by Sandra Davis and Anna Geyer

GROW UP is a 22-minute double-projector film and video work. The work emerges at a critical moment in contemporary discourse regarding women's agency over their public witnessing of sexual harassment and assault. It explores the collision of this witnessing with the media spectacle and politicization of dynamics of gender and sexual assault. The voices of women are heard in militant expression, and public reaction to, the Senate hearings for a nomination of a US Supreme Court Justice by Donald Trump. During the hearings, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testified to her sexual assault during her high school years, by nominee Brett Kavanaugh. It is a work whose theme, methods and form strive to, after Edward Said and Anita Hill, speak truth to power. 

Selections from her testimony, as well as material from the filmmakers’ interviews with other women, reveal the importance of the act of women’s testimony to their specific personal experience; and in general , to the importance of publically "witnessing" their experience, in the face of attempts to silence, dismiss, and ridicule it.

Sandra Davis is a filmmaker rooted in experimental and feminist practices. Anna Geyer is a San Francisco-based experimental filmmaker and writer.

AFTER COMA by SooHyun Jamie Kim

Seven short poems are introduced both in Korean and in English. Each scene is represented by a poem and composed of symbolic images and sounds.

"This is a film about the process of grief and facing the loss of my father. It tells the story of where it has left me as well as the last moments I had with him. Not only is this my own method of processing these complex emotions but it is also my way of sharing this experience with others who have and will go through the same experience. It was crucial for this project to be shot on film because the format holds a symbolic significance. Just like film, grief needs time to be processed and to be taken care of gently."

SooHyun Jamie Kim is an experimental filmmaker/artist born in Seoul, South Korea, currently studying at EICAR in Paris.

2021
RETRODREAMING by Alisa Berger

RETRODREAMING examines the common phenomenon of ghostly, abandoned schools due to demographic change in the countryside of Japan. Empty schools in deserted villages tell their own story: May it be during the pandemic, after a nuclear catastrophe, or just due to depopulation. The film references the Japanese tradition of telling "Kaidan"(ghost stories/scary stories) and the multiple school-themed "Kaidan"(Gakkō no Kaidan, Japanese for "Scary School Story") in Japanese mainstream culture, which encompass the idea of entities and memories remaining in these architectures.

The film focuses on the visual quality of the Showa-era architecture of the abandoned Sawada School in Nakanojo. A voice from a tape recorder recalls the reality of a secret experiment during a pandemic that resulted in further mysterious events. The audiovisual experience draws the viewer into a strange, suspenseful atmosphere somewhere between an unlived retro-future, a sci-fi dream, and an unfinished mystery tale.

Alisa Berger was born in 1987 in Makhachkala (Republic of Dagestan, Russia) and raised in Lviv (Ukraine) until she immigrated with her family to Essen (Germany) in 1995. Her work explores the perception of body and the borders of identity in the medium of film.

ELLES S'ÉLÈVENT, CES FORTERESSES ÉPONGES by Guillaume Vallée

"elles s'élèvent, ces forteresses éponges (they rise, these sponge fortresses) is an experimental animated short film. The work deals with my own reconnection to the sensory memory of my adolescence, which has been partially lost. This rediscovery is portrayed through the materiality of 35mm film, that is, through painting and etching on the film emulsion."

Experimental filmmaker and video artist, Guillaume Vallée graduated from Concordia University with a degree in Animation and an MFA in Studio Arts - Film Production. He works mainly in Super8, 16mm, VHS and stereoscopic video.

A JOURNEY TO AVEBURY by Stanley Schtinter

"We want to see ourselves translated into stone and plants, we want to take walks in ourselves." (Friedrich Nietzsche)

In 1971, Derek Jarman took an 8mm camera to the ancient landscape of Avebury, filming henges and standing stones as he walked. In 2021, fifty years after Jarman's trip and during a global pandemic, Schtinter attempted to replicate the journey, re-shooting the film as closely as possible with an iPhone. At once a critique of capitalism's culture of reproduction; an indictment of its canonisations; and an attempt to subvert the insistence of a dystopic 'present' for an experience of place without the constraints of time.

"Stanley Schtinter runs with wolves." (Sukhdev Sandhu)

INTERMEDE by Maria Kourkouta

Images from a small shipyard somewhere in Greece. Water, bodies, ropes, chains, wood and metal in a filmic poem in black and white 16mm. Between the repair of boats and their sailing anew, a few men pull them ashore and push them back into the water, once repaired. This in-between is an intense yet gentle time slot, like the choral interlude of an ancient tragedy made of gestures and movements that swing from closeness to distance, from bonding to detachment, from tension to tenderness.

Filmmaker, editor and producer, born in Greece, in 1982. After studying history, she moved to Paris where she studied film theory. She makes films since 2010, mostly in 16mm film. After her short film Return to Aeolus street in 2014 (Arte Prize for Best European short film at Oberhausen FF), she co-directed in 2016 her first feature film with the poet Niki Giannari, Spectres are haunting Europe (Best international documentary at Jihlava's FF). She has been an active member of the french artist-run film laboratories L'Etna and L'Abominable for more than ten years.

RAGTAG by Giuseppe Boccassini

RAGTAG is a chronological timeline collage based on a wide corpus of footage taken from the so-called classic era of American cinema which 1950s French critics labeled film noir. The decoupage-based work covers roughly twenty years, or 310 noir films, spanning from the early 1940s to the late 1950s. It also includes some foreign-made films noirs.

Noir harks back to the earlier tradition of Gothic literature, the fiction of Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe. Later, it displayed affinity for the hard-boiled tradition of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain. It was characterized by a dark visual style, owed primarily to German Expressionism which was brought to Hollywood with the influx of German émigrés during the war.

Yet, film noir is essentially a way of looking at the world, an outlook on life and human existence that can fit into any genre. It is a compound of Yankee ingenuity and the post-World War II atmosphere of fear and paranoia due the death of God, the loss of insular security and meaning of things. It depicts an inversion of traditional values and the corresponding moral ambivalence, the Red Scare and the nuclear threat, the fascination with crime, thriller, suspense, western, adventure, horror, melodrama and science fiction. In working with this heritage, RAGTAG uses various techniques such as flicker and repetition to achieve the so-called Verfremdungseffekt (distancing effect) common to the broader experimental film tradition of found footage. In doing so, the intention is not to use this found footage in a documentary context or to illustrate an evidence-based narration. Rather, as an extensive historical portrait of the human psyche of the twentieth century and its dark post-war landscape, the film lets the past and the future be inscribed in a present gesture. As an act of perpetual destruction and recreation, a sort of ouroboros, a tail-devourer that roams on the threshold between history and desire, visible and invisible, light and shadow.

Giuseppe Boccassini is an Italian filmmaker mainly working in Germany and Italy. He studied film theory at the University of Bologna and film directing at the New University of Cinema and Television located in Cinecittà, Rome. His work has been shown at several international film festivals and exhibitions, including FID Marseille, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, Torino Film Festival, FESTACURTAS BH (Brasil), Crossroads SF and others. He is in charge of programming at Fracto Experimental Film Encounter held yearly at ACUD macht neu in Berlin.

TWISTER, THREE SCREENS IN THE DESERT by Noé Grenier

TWISTER, TROIS ÉCRANS DANS LE DÉSERT (TWISTER, THREE SCREENS IN THE DESERT) is a found-footage film based on a 35mm trailer of the American action film TWISTER (Jan de Bont, 1996). It refers to an incident of collective hallucination of a screening that never took place: the May 22, 1996, screening at the Can-View Drive-In in southern Canada, cancelled due to a tornado alert. The spectators who attended that night nevertheless constructed a memory of having watched the film in the middle of a storm. TWISTER, TROIS ÉCRANS DANS LE DÉSERT is a personal and fragmentary reconstruction of a screening that never happened.

Born in 1987 in Alpes-Maritimes, Noé Grenier earned a diploma from the ESBA-MOCO in Montpellier. After three years in Brussels, he joined the Fresnoy National Studio of Contemporary Arts in 2014. In 2021, he joined the Malterie (Lille) as an associated artist for a three-year period as part of the Impulse program. He also collaborates with Gwendal Sartre and Gilles Ribero as part of the trio Catharsis Projection.

KIBONUMWE / METEORITE by Simon Rittmeier

Kigali, Rwanda.
"- Everybody talked about it at a certain point. Do I believe it really happened or that it was actually here? Hmm, I am not sure.
- So, do you think it's true?
- I can only describe it from what I've seen on television. A huge pointy element that pierced the ground. And the earth around it... tshrrgg! [makes gestures] fell everywhere. Disturbing the peace, disturbing the status quo, the way things are."

Simon Rittmeier studied visual arts and film at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg and at Academy of Media Arts Cologne. His works, both experimental and essayistic, explore the power of moving images and their political impact. From Havana to Tel Aviv and on to Ouagadougou, his films fluctuate between documentary and fiction. Festivals and exhibitions include Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Visions du Réel and The Studio Museum Harlem, New York.

PLACES WE'LL BREATHE de Davor Sanvincenti

PLACES WE'LL BREATHE is an audiovisual essay that activates the imagination through a travelogue of constructed and anonymous landscapes. It is a note about the future. Narratives that intertwine between the visual, the auditory, and the textual speak about loss, exploration, presence, vigilance, responsibility, struggle and freedom.

Davor Sanvincenti (1979, Croatia) is specifically interested in a field of audiovisual phenomenology and anthropology of visual culture, particularly focused on the conditions and forms of human senses and perceptions. His practice takes shape in a variety of media – film and video, photography, physical light and sound installations and live media performances. His work plays with the concept of illusion, exploring the possible boundaries of perception and the construction of experience.

CONCERT FOR 2 KOR(E)AS by Daphné Le Sergent

CONCERT FOR 2 KOR(E)AS is a cine-concert in which two kora musicians interpret the traditional Korean song "Arirang". The images take the viewer on a journey from the East to the West, from the frozen shores of the Yellow Sea to the hot sands of the ancient Malian empire Manden. Born in Korea and adopted in France, the artist was inspired by blues music and the notion of diaspora over the course of this project. But the real journey here is created by the musicians, by the two koras which modulate the "Arirang" and strangely pick up the melismatic intonations of the Korean voices.

Daphné Le Sergent is an artist and photographer who undertakes artistic and theoretical investigations into notions of separation and boundaries. Whether through various arrangements (photo/video polyptychs) or by creating tension between different zones of an image (in photographs and drawings), her work creates dissociations in the direct perception of visuals to bring forth scissions, cracks, in the intimate space of the gaze.

COMMODITY TRADING : DIES IRAE by Michael WOODS

Common & brand names:

Day of Wrath / Part 4 of The Numb Spiral

Effects Classification:

Classified as having properties of both Disassociative Anesthetics X Datura Stramonium

Description:

Video HD 1080P 23.976

Dies Irae is a bad trip that replicates the dissolution of the self/government/family/body within the solvent of a white supremacist hyperreal suspension. In the movie’s narrative track, M. Woods (the manufacturer of these Disassociative Productions) attempts to enter The Numb Spiral through the “Great Incision of Oxoniae.” He portrays a white father lulled into the digital sickness to be with Wes, his doppelgänger. After entering a portal in a sex webcam site, he becomes Jaldaboath, the demiurge, recklessly seeking completion of the Self through attempts at contacting The Numb Spiral. Meanwhile, Joshua enters The Numb Spiral through 9DVR, a game platform installed at Culver City’s Westfield Shopping Center in Los Angeles. The White Father haunts Joshua until Joshua decides to burn down the White Father’s house in righteous anger.

In the movie’s “Bad Trip” track, a Vast Active Living Intelligence System communicates through the solubility of analog and digital medias. Some of these images, which proliferate the Numb Spiral, are referred to as the HOROS System. This system forms the visual underpinning of the Solis Codex, the accompanying extended text that explicates M. Woods’ relationship to The Numb Spiral.

Manufacturer Note:

This media drug was first synthesized and manufactured by M. Woods, a media terrorist producing Disassociative reactions.

AGUA DE VINAGRE by Frédérique Menant

"Two tropical islands on either side of the Atlantic ocean.
One deserted, the other organic.
Two trips, twenty years apart. From each one I came back with images.
AGUA DE VINAGRE is a travel film suspended between these two moments in time. An exploration of my presence through the images, the impossible expectation for an absent person to appear, there in front of the shutter of my camera.
A cine-mourning."

Frédérique Menant makes film-poems in 16mm. She is a member of the artist-run laboratories L'Etna and L'Abominable.

WHO SHOT CHRIS BURDEN? by Juliana Borinski and Guillaume Leingre

"SHOOT" is one of the most famous filmed performances in the history of art: it shows the young American artist Chris Burden being shot with a rifle. He is 25 years old. The scene is shot in Los Angeles. If "SHOOT" illustrates the artist's sacrifice to create his work, the performance is also part of a cultural fascination with violence - and with filmed violence. But the person who made the film ("to shoot"), and who took care of the artist, remains unknown: it is Barbara T. Smith, at the time Barbara Burden. She lives in Pasadena and remembers, in 2018, the circumstances of the action.

Juliana Borinski is an artist. Working with still images (photography) and time-based media (film, installation, video), she works at the conjunction between iconography and iconoclasm.

Guillaume Leingre is an art worker and professor of art history at Institut Français de la Mode.

CHARACTER by Paul Heintz

In his novel 1984, published in 1948, George Orwell tells the story of a Londoner who undertakes a solitary resistance to the totalitarian party of Big Brother. His name is Winston Smith. The English telephone directory currently lists twenty-five people living in London with the same name. This film is an invitation to meet them, to see if there exists among these namesakes and the novel's hero an unspoken connection.

Born in 1989 in Saint-Avold, Paul Heintz holds diplomas from the School of Fine Arts of Nancy, the School for the Decorative Arts in Paris and the Fresnoy School for Contemporary Art. His work, which takes the form of sculptural objects, sound pieces, films and installations, has been presented at numerous contemporary art events and film festivals, such as FID Marseille, IFFR (Rotterdam), Paris Nuit Blance, Circulation(s). He is a recipient of the 2019 Révélation Emerige prize.

RUPTURES IN THE REEL by Peter Miller

Dr. Ellen Lindstrom : Now try to remember that alpha is another word for passive.
Gillian Bellaver : Alright
Dr. Ellen Lindstrom : Visualize sitting in an empty theater in front of a blank screen and let that blank screen fill your mind.
- from Brian De Palma's THE FURY (1978)

Peter Miller

ANDREA NOVOA TALKS ABOUT HER FILM NINGUN LUGAR PARA MORIR

Ningún lugar para morir (2019) by Andrea Novoa is part of the Atelier 105 film program that you can watch here from Monday 22 to Sunday 28 February 2021.


Your film interweaves the political and the personal on various levels. Can you tell us about the forest you filmed and the different stories that you develop within it?

The place portrayed in the film is the forest where I live since I moved from the Chilean capital, Santiago, a few years ago. It is located in the Araucania Region, the main zone of the indigenous territorial conflict.
The forest I film is the one around my home. Located in the foothills of the Andes, it is covered with native trees and surrounded by volcanoes.
For now, it remains narrowly safe from the predatory timber industry that constantly threatens and attacks the forest and the Mapuche people. But, since the forest exceeds the limits established by the government, the threat is palpable.
The territory where I film has been ancestrally inhabited by indigenous communities. They have been in their majority displaced or eradicated in the most horrible ways since colonial times and until today. In fact, the forest and the communities are treated with brutality by the wealthiest families of Chile, owners of the timber companies, which are allied with the government. The Mapuches are constantly bullied by military forces and state police, murdered under democratic governments.
My portrait of this forest joins this denunciation.
It is also the place that accompanied me during my pregnancy with my first daughter and received me at the time when I had to face her death.
It is a territory that represents the living struggle of the Mapuche people to defend their land and its ancestral wisdom. It is the place where I live and that gives me strength. It is a forest that should not die.   

This film is the third part of your trilogy Desastres Naturales (Natural Disasters). Can you tell us about this body of work and about how “natural” are the disasters you evoke?

Desastres Naturales is a series of three films made in three different territories over the course of four years. Each one is independent, and they were not meant as companion pieces at the time they were shot. 
Over time, these film portraits of places I inhabited encountered my journal writings and the occurrences of natural phenomena. 
The first film is Tropico Violeta, shot in Cuba, edited in-camera, reprinted artisanally and re-edited by hand. This chapter evokes my encounter with the hurricane Irma that took place when I was living in La Habana. This event is related through my first analog experimentations, images of a feminine body in relation with nature and games of color. 
The second one, entitled Vuelvo a casa, was shot in the mountains, in the Cordillera of the Andes, near Santiago, my hometown.
My diary speaks of earthquakes unfelt due to being away and about my reencounter with my “home” after a long period spent outside.
The third one is Ningún lugar para morir, shot in the forest, which I mentioned before, during a period of intense volcano activity. This film is born from an encounter with death as well as with the strength of the territory and the indigenous struggle to defend it.  

You make photochemical films, which you process yourself. Please share with us more about your practice and the conditions of analog filmmaking in Chile today.

My analog practice begins with my photography studies and is still based on a process of trial and error. In the first year of my studies, I became acquainted with the photo laboratory and learned how to develop negatives. Then the instruction switched to digital. I continued to work in analog photography and eventually built a small laboratory in the bathroom of my studio to develop my negatives and those of others with the same need, since most commercial laboratories were ceasing to develop black and white.
 
Some time later, while I was in Cuba, I met a group of students who were bringing back to life the San Antonio de los Baños School laboratory, and we spent time sharing and reusing expired chemistry. It was there that, a year later, I participated in a workshop given by the filmmaker Daïchi Saïto, in which we filmed and experimented with 16mm color print film.
 
Back in Chile, I looked for a way to keep filming. I managed to bring film stock and borrowed a Bolex camera, and, by the time that I needed to develop, I had met a group of filmmakers who had a processing tank and were developing in a home laboratory. They were testing formulas and trying things, advised by Nelson Vargas, a lab technician whose laboratory, CronoFoto, has survived the arrival of digital technology in Chile. In the beginning, with this collective named Ceis8, we use to meet at night and project the films in progress that each one of us was working on. We helped each other to develop, find people who could bring from abroad films and chemistry that, even today, are impossible to find in Chile.
 
Coming together was fundamental for us to keep working. Our group grew as we welcomed more members, and we organized itinerant public projections on 16mm and Super 8. These events made us realize that a large circle of people enjoyed watching analog cinema and were interested in experimental practices. We then started to propose educational workshops and invite other filmmakers to participate, as we kept the screenings going. 
 
At this point, we had made our way out of the bathroom. We installed the laboratory in a spacious studio, which allowed us to present open-air screenings. Then we received the unexpected visit of the filmmakers Dianna Barrie and Richard Tuohy (Nonolab, Australia) who taught us to strike prints with a projector and showed us the color-timing machine they had made. They shared with us their knowledge and helped us with materials and equipment so we could continue working in the future.
 
And so the « magic » kept happening in a place where cinema as an analog practice repeatedly runs into difficulties. Film stock is rare, projectors break, developing tanks are held up at customs, and the conditions are still very precarious. 
But we keep making handmade films, which makes a lot of sense to me. It compels me to insist on making films, believe in luck and respect the chemistry.
 
A few years ago, running away from the rhythms and productivist pressures of the city, I moved to the south of Chile and settled there. Together with the filmmaker Fernanda Vicenz we created Praeclara Imagen, a lab and film creation project, now in its initial stages. We’re working on creating a darkroom, collecting equipment and elaborating projects with the aim to bring together analog cinema practice and ecology.

PABLO MAZZOLO TALKS ABOUT HIS FILM CENIZA VERDE

LUZ OLIVIA TALKS ABOUT HER FILM SPLINTERING

Splintering (2019) by Luz Olivia is part of the Atelier 105 film program that you can watch here from Monday 22 to Sunday 28 February 2021.


Your film is a beautiful and powerful account of a very violent experience. Why and how is it important for you to tell such a story in your own (artistic) terms?

Historically, narratives regarding violence are dictated by those in power & told in narrow parameters. It is important to express stories such as this one in more nebulous & open terms that give space to those who endure such an experience to frame it in their own way.

Can you share with us more about the process of making this film and the different cinematic and narrative techniques you have combined?

Splintering was developed from feelings of mental & physical isolation that often occur after living through violence. The film opens with a brief voice-over that provides context, followed by a combination of relatively static live-action shots to visually communicate an initial sense of paralysis & inertia. After several minutes of increasing tension, stop-motion animation is employed to invoke a sense of frenetic energy: domestic objects embody an increasing, excessive abundance of thoughts that build up & eventually break open, propelling re-entry into the world. 

Why do you choose to work with photochemical film, which you hand-process?

The medium of photochemical film results in a tangible product that gives substantial weight to memory & thought-process. Translating a story from internal workings with archival material adds an additional level of symbolic legitimacy attached to the resulting physical film.

VIKTOR BRIM TALKS ABOUT HIS FILM OBJECTS AND ARTIFACTS

Objects and Artifacts (2019) by Viktor Brim is part of the Atelier 105 film program that you can watch here from Monday 22 to Sunday 28 February 2021.


Where exactly is the "post-apocalyptic landscape" of this film located and how did you get there?

Objects and Artifacts was filmed in Yakutia and the Murmansk Oblast of the Russian Federation. Both are areas known for their heavy industry. I was interested in these areas in regard to their strategic importance for the Soviet Union as well as Russia today. In these places, vast amounts of mineral resources are extracted, including nickel, oil, diamonds, apatite, nepheline and gold. Both are also areas that are close to the Arctic Circle and thus have a significant impact on living and working conditions. 

These areas are not truly representative of the Soviet Union, nor are many aware of their importance. When people talk about specific places of Russia or the USSR, they usually refer to Moscow or Saint Petersburg. And yet these places were of enormous importance in terms of economic and geopolitical supremacy. Without access to these resources, history would have been written differently. In the patina of the ruins and rusting industrial complexes, so much historicity stands out, which has been deposited in the sedimentary layers of heavy metals over many decades.

Can you elaborate on the film's enigmatic title and on your formal approach as a filmmaker?

The title of the film refers to a way of dealing with the past that is very specific to the Russian landscape. Perhaps it has to do with the immense size of the country. Especially in places where many industrial complexes were built in a short period of time, there are many ruins of older versions of the built facilities. Ghost towns from the time of the USSR are very common. Traveling around Russia, I can't shake the feeling that the country has shrunk, as if a greater civilization and activity had taken place here before. The many ruins and old industrial zones from the Soviet era, which are still scattered all over the country like relics, seem to me like a kind of time capsule. In the film I have tried to capture these time capsules, which vegetate fluidly from one era to the next. 

Can you tell us a bit more about your political and ecological concerns with the post-Soviet landscape?

In the project I was interested in understanding the confluence of ideology and its materialization within industrial localities or territories. The extraction of minerals and raw materials is directly linked to geopolitical strategies. This process is linked to intertwined questions of identity and nation. I have chosen a filmic form with little commentary to confront these questions because I think that cinematic aesthetics can create new connections on the perceptual level. I also think that the cinematic observation of the post-Soviet landscape can raise the question of a fundamental way of dealing with matter. Whether it is the Soviet multi-ethnic state or a new federal structure that orders, manages, and organizes the Russian landscape, the question of accountability on the global level remains the same. In my work, I try to confront this complexity with different stylistic approaches. 

SOETKIN VERSTEGEN TALKS ABOUT HER FILM FREEZE FRAME

Freeze Frame (2019) by Soetkin Verstegen is part of the Atelier 105 film program that you can watch here from Monday 22 to Sunday 28 February 2021.


Can you elaborate on your ideas about movement and stillness as treated through the motif of ice in this stop-motion animation film?

I thought of ice as flowing movement that comes to a stop, and I wanted to re-animate this movement. This material, used in animation, has an interesting relation to stretching and condensing time, just like the invention of film has allowed to analyze time differently. In ice cubes I saw decaying celluloid images, with their fragility, luminosity and capricious textures. On celluloid film, stillness needs to keep moving, otherwise the image would melt away.

Your film shows a vivid interest in early cinema experiments and the purely visual aspect of filmmaking. Can you tell us a bit about your sources of inspiration?

For this film I was mostly drawn to early cinema's enchantment with scientific observation and discovery, with its poetic and haunting images of microscopy, underwater films, movement analysis and early medical imaging techniques like the X-ray. It was a fascinating period full of technological optimism, but now there's a lot of decay in this optimism. Other sources of inspiration were old films of the ice harvest, as well as negatives that were found frozen and thus preserved in ice, and which were developed a century later. The figures in the film are capturing, exploring and preserving, as in a ritual. They go as far as to try to capture themselves, digging into their own bodies. In the process of immortalizing something in an image, they may harm or destroy the original.

The film also experiments a lot the relation between image and sound. How did you work with your collaborators on the sound?

I made notes for every shot on what I had in mind for the sound. For example, I wanted the sound to be confusing – is there a projector playing and we are watching a film or is the sound coming from the puppets' actions? Or how I wanted the sound to make a bridge between shots. I sent it to Andrea and Michal, and they started working on the sound before the film was finished. Then I went to Berlin and the three of us sat in Michal's sound studio to create the entire sound.

PETER-CONRAD BEYER TALKS ABOUT HIS FILM LE RÊVE

Le Rêve (2020) by Peter-Conrad Beyer is part of the Atelier 105 film program that you can watch here from Monday 22 to Sunday 28 February 2021.

DANIEL BURKHARDT TALKS ABOUT HIS FILM SEMIOTICS OF THE CITY

Semiotics of the City (2020) by Daniel Burkhardt is part of the Atelier 105 film program that you can watch here from Monday 22 to Sunday 28 February 2021.

SAMUEL YAL PARLE DE SON FILM ENVOL

JEAN-MICHEL BOUHOURS PARLE DE SON FILM AY CARMELA !

SENSITIVE MATERIAL by Nataliya Ilchuk

The film's starting point is a collection of randomly filmed instants of happiness and an accidentally captured audio recording. In a painful conversation, fifty-year-old Lilia speaks of her mental trauma as a result of her parents' constant disputes during her childhood, while her mother justifies the lack of love by the strict frames of a totalitarian society.

Nataliya Ilchuk was born in Lviv (Ukraine) in 1985. A graduate of the Fresnoy - Studio National (2020), she has worked as programmer for short film festivals in Ukraine and has self-produced numerous experimental films since 2006.

LE SOLEIL TOUT ENTIER NE SE TROUVE NULLE PART by Jérôme Cognet

Inspired by Isaac Asimov's short story "Nightfall", this film portrays the anxiety and hysteria of a civilization that has never known night, in the face of the impending death of the suns that compose its solar system.

The images of LE SOLEIL TOUT ENTIER NE SE TROUVE NULLE PART are taken from scenes of existing narrative films where the sun is predominant, and from which all human forms have been erased in post-production. This film is organized around colorimetric variations and a decreasing luminosity, as in Asimov's story. The soundtrack comes from sound recordings of the energy produced by solar winds captured by NASA's Parker Probe.

Jérôme Cognet is an artist and experimental filmmaker based in Paris.

YAGUE by Martín Molina Gola

YAGUE, a travel journal from Peru that works with the question of memory via the degeneration of video images. An exploration of a hallucinatory space constructed from visual and aural debris. The figure of the endlessly flowing image is simultaneously a visual leitmotif that speaks to the passage of time as well as a reflection on the nature of images as deformed mirrors of reality. The soundtrack, created by the composer Méryll Ampe, responds to the piece by producing dream spaces out of electronic and acoustic materials on the limit of erasure.

Martín Molina Gola (1988, Mexico City) is a filmmaker and researcher. After studying filmmaking at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, he directed and worked as cinematographer on several short documentary and experimental films. He is currently writing a doctoral thesis at Paris 8 on Fernand Deligny and the artistic avant-gardes.

2020
CORPS SAMPLES BY ASTRID DE LA CHAPELLE

At the beginning, there is simultaneity. A marine fossil of a crinoid discovered near the summit of Mount Everest, a famous British mountaineer who vanishes, and a Russian statesman who dies are the starting points of a story on the transformation of matter. Of these bodies, gone in 1924, all that remains is everything.

The film is a free and transversal exploration of terrestrial matter and its transformations. The preserved bodies of George Mallory and Lenin, one fossilized by weather conditions, the other embalmed with the use of petrochemistry, have become, in a way, the eternal achievements of the political ideologies that had moved them. Humans have permutated their original organic cycle in order to nestle within other, larger cycles of the Earth. Produced using original 16mm and images found on the internet, the various levels of imagery and the intrinsic textures of each medium telescope and merge into a kind of hallucinatory flow.

Astrid de la Chapelle is a French artist and filmmaker. In her films she experiments with storytelling, particularly in relation to geology and the economic circuits of the Earth's resources, as well as science fiction. She also plays in the group Shrouded and the Dinner with four other artists.

ADAGIO by Igor Dimitri

A group of friends perform an experience about space and duration, body and dance. One of them jumps from a structure repeatedly, others just watch, while someone else inhabits the house under construction. Class contrasts are evident, different types of music mix in the air, and we don't understand the whole picture.

In the context of the explosive revolution and the feminist liberation of the Argentinian capital Buenos Aires, different groups strive to create spontaneous performative acts - rituals where the frontier is no longer one's body, but that of the other. Interrelated reflections develop in this environment, and the concerns become materials, the body, the surface of contact, extensions, directions, intensities...

Igor Dimitri is a Portuguese filmmaker. He has an MA in Documentary Cinema from the Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires. His films relate especially to certain notions of distance, longing and embodied memory, mainly through travel and performance.

PERDUE by Julien Pluchard

A meeting of several myths: shadows in movement, which the filmmaker associates with cave paintings; the voice of the "sacred monster" Sarah Bernhardt, the world's first star, as she delivers the monologue of Phèdre a hundred years ago; an attempt to exit the labyrinth.

Julien Pluchard works primarily in theater as actor and musician. With PERDUE, he begins an exploration of the limits of cinematographic fiction.

ENVOL by Samuel Yal

ENVOL is an animated collaborative project that was conceived and edited during the lockdown in France using nearly 1000 images of a bird's flight, which were shot by Muybridge in 1883. The musical composition was performed on the harpsichord - an instrument that, in older times, used birds' beaks for plucking the strings. This musical texture, which owes to the beak and to the air the transmission of its celestial poetics, thus responds to the chaotic hum of the bird images in the film.

Samuel Yal is a sculptor and animator whose animated film NŒVUS, made entirely with porcelain, was post-produced at Atelier 105 in 2016.

PURKYNE'S DUSK by Helena Gouveia Monteiro

Purkyně's Dusk is an experimental short film based on the visual effect of decreasing colour perception in low light conditions. From an investigation into the physiology of vision inspired by the works of Jan Evangelista Purkyně, the film uses both digital and analogue means to disrupt the spectator’s perception of colour, tint, contrast, and saturation.

SEMIOTICS OF THE CITY by Daniel Burkhardt

"The city is not. Not because of a hypothetical, physical absence — the city is well present — but because it escapes naming." (Johannes Binotto and Andri Gerber)
In SEMIOTICS OF THE CITY, shots of urban situations flicker past in rapid succession. They are underlaid by computer-generated voices that enumerate the audio-visual elements they contain. The result is a close-meshed network of terms and categories whose sense of representing the depicted urbanity as completely as possible is taken ad absurdum.

2019
SCÈNES DE MÉNAGE by Alexandre Larose

This serial cinematic exploration is inspired by various habitual and imagined gestures/actions performed by my parents, mainly within the domestic spaces of the family home. The chapter of the project that I am currently completing in Paris, as part of a residency at the Couvent des Récollets, centers on the figure of my father, as he interacts with the interiors of the studio.
- Alexandre Larose

The artist -as a lauréat du programme de résidences internationales Ville de Paris aux Récollets- acknowledges the support of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.

OMBRES by Martine Rousset

Wandering,
through Central Asia, the Caucasus, Kurdistan... To Istanbul...
Cities and trains, steppes and snow
to that place where the pulse of time evaporates;
a very simple film, a navigation, attention being taken to the threshold of time going by hazardous paths....
and very slow skies, up to the Black Sea, where Istanbul is absent, slips away under the steps, leaves the place empty, abandons in its wake undecided times
and the gaze goes about it,
is attentive, on the edge of absence, on the edge of a sea on the lookout, blind, for a long time,
in a very simple welcome, in an absolute listening, lets the rumour of the wheel of time approach, motionless,
sees what spreads, evaporates, disintegrates.

PRIMEIRAS IMPRESSÕES DE UMA PAISAGEM by João Nisa

First Impressions of a Landscape is a film centred on the images of the surrounding landscape projected on the interior walls of a section of Lisbon’s Águas Livres Aqueduct, produced by the accentuation of this space’s potential to act as a series of “camera obscura” devices. The film aims to function simultaneously as an inquiry on the conditions of the image’s appearance and as a visual and aural study of a specific landscape, located on the outskirts of Lisbon, while proposing an intense perceptive and sensorial experience. First Impressions of a Landscape is the first output of a work in progress taking place within the Águas Livres Aqueduct.

LE RÊVE by Peter Conrad Beyer

Le corbeau se rêve dans la nature de la forêt, il se rêve dans un monde de plantes et d'insectes.
Il voyage, vole dans la nature, vole à l'intérieur de lui-même. Il est la nature elle-même, la nature elle-même se rêve en transe.

Der Rabe träumt sich in das Geflecht der Natur des Waldes, er träumt sich in eine Welt aus Pflanzen und Insekten.
Er reist, fliegt in die Natur, fliegt in sein Inneres. Er ist die Natur selbst. Die Natur selbst träumt sich in Trance.

SOUS LE SIGNE DU LION by Jean-Michel Bouhours

The film Chantilly was badly received at the time when it was made in 1976 (co-directed by Patrick Delabre): it was reproached to the film a penchant "gestaltist" because of its still "grid" in the middle of moving images. With time, I analyzed this argument as a wrong one and more, I think that the simultaneity of a still element within moving images enrich the topic of the frame of the cinematic pictures.


While reworking the film for its digitization, I rediscovered many involuntary references to the history of abstraction in Western painting: Kandinsky, Klee, Mondrian because of the grid but also Augusto Giacometti and more generally the pointillism. Many references that I ignored at the time or knew very badly (for example, I did not know anything about writings by Kandinsky called Points, line, plans). I would like to highlight the plastic dimension of the original elements with a single-screen version scanning each element to then reconstruct sequences frame by frame. 

BORGO by Lucie Leszez

Views of everyday life, Borgo Panigale, the road to the San Vitale Gate in Bologna and a breakaway: the Apeninns, Portivy.
A tremor of the photographed landscapes go with the appearance and the disappearance of images seeking their frame.

DESASTRES NATURALES by Andrea Novoa

16mm trilogy

TROPICO VIOLETA is a touch between realities, where nature and femininity meet. It is the beginning of accidents and encounters. The original material was filmed using print film in Cuba and, two years later, copied and assembled by hand in Chile.

VUELVO A CASA was born from a geographical landing, an encounter with the place of origin, with home and its contradictions. Multiple exposures and in-camera editing merge past and present, black and white. A rediscovery of the Andes Mountains, a reunion with the dry and cold air.

NINGÚN LUGAR PARA MORIR begins from an unexpected change of place. Everyday images in a territory with memories of war in southern Chile coexist with those of a childbirth. Light and darkness meet in colors, blacks and whites.
The film portrays a forest, a death, and glimmers of light.
Dedicated to Lena.

IF THE EDGES START TO HURT by Emma Piper-Burket

This is a film about staying supple after heartbreak and what happens when it snows in the desert. 

There is a big tree in Southwestern New Mexico where wild turkeys sometimes roost. The tree is near a house, and at dusk everyone in the house gets very quiet hoping the turkeys won't get scared away and go sleep somewhere else. As the big birds fly up to the highest branches their wings flap, displacing the wind around them. The process can last an hour or more, and there is a kind of sacredness to it. This film was conceived under that tree in a time when different generations of women were reliving past sorrows through each other's current struggles.

SPLINTERING by Luz Olivia

SPLINTERING is an examination of the emotional isolation that occurs post-sexual assault and a reactionary exploration of how to shatter a space of separation. Is it possible to find personal closure in the wake of violence, rather than relying on public evaluation and legal trial? By deconstructing traditional narrative on hand processed 16mm film, SPLINTERING aims to form an alternative account of subversion and resistance.

FREEZE FRAME by Soetkin Verstegen

Freeze frame: the most absurd technique since the invention of the moving image. Through an elaborate process of duplicating the same image over and over again, it creates the illusion of stillness.

In this stop motion film, identical figures perform the hopeless task of preserving blocks of ice. The repetitive movements reanimate the animals captured inside.

RALFS FARBEN by Lukas Marxt

In residency: Lukas Marxt & Michael Petri

RALFS FARBEN is an experimental portrait of a schizophrenic person living in Lanzarote (Canary islands), whom I accompanied for over 5 years. The film shows the struggle of his inner life in contrast to the deserted volcanic surroundings.

ECRITURE - DE IMAGO - ENVERS by Patrice Kirchhofer

A trilogy started at the end of the 90s with "Envers", film on the back of the speech, on the relationship between saying and saying, with Lacan's formula:
"Let it be said remains forgotten behind what is said in what is heard". On this logic of opposites and on the dictatorship of the signifier, on the structure of language.
The second part is dedicated to the image, that of the cave of Lascaux, that of the self-portrait ..., to its difficulty of existence, its status, its importance.
The third part is dedicated to writing, its conception and its birth. That of the letter; hence the being.

MIDNIGHT ORANGE by Gautam Valluri

A film about unresolved crescendos, thwarted anticipations and unmanaged escalations told through architecture gone awry.

Filmed in the tombs of the Paigah family in Hyderabad, India, noise and silence, flicker and stillness tell the tale of a tradition of architecturally outdoing your ancestors, even in death's eternal sleep.

2018
THIS SHORE: A FAMILY STORY by Tzuan Wu

Stories had been told repeatedly, their shapes changed by the narrators. Memories revisited each time in different form like the waves beat on the shore, then vanish. THIS SHORE is an experimental documentary which opens with a story of my family: my American aunt found a painting of my grandmother by chance, in a random Chinese restaurant in the middle of nowhere - she said she cried. By tracing this story and reproducing its meaning, the film wonders through different topics: the construction of the Cold War, USA and Taiwan relations, different generations of Chinese diaspora since the 1950s, contemporary immigration and cross-nation fluidity, family romances, religion, and ancestors...

The distance of memory is the distance of diaspora; the experience of narration is the experience of migration. This film uses various formats: 16mm, Super 8, VHS/Beta home video, and digital video. Through the reassembling and expansion of the heterogeneous sounds and images, the film aims to capture fragments of emotions in this restless, changeable world. Through the interviews of characters under the mask of the Flying Dutchman, the film gradually turns to another tale. The “real” histories, personal or collective memories, gradually being reformed into a fictional fantasy of “The Flying Dutch Man”.

DERRUBADA NÃO! by Yann Beauvais

Derrubada não! is a film essay deploying a reflection through an experiment whose objective is to measure the impact of an artistic gesture crystallizing a set of questions relating to what can be defined as belonging: an ethnic group, a history, a language, a culture...
This project is located in the Sertão in the "nordeste" of Brazil, and more precisely in the Pernambuc.

Derrubada não! (with a running time of 23 minutes) takes as its starting point the project of an indigenous artist from the Pernambuc, Edson Barrus, of the Atikum-Umã tribe, which aims to transform a piece of land into an ecological sanctuary.
The project developed following the artist's rapprochement with his people, the Atikum-Umã Indians, who are the Indians located in a triangular territory bounded on one side by the mountains bordering Carnassière da Pena, Barra do Silva and Conceição das Crioulas. This land is located in the Caatinga, which is both a region and a vegetation characteristic of the "nordeste", formed by thorny shrubs that lose their leaves during the dry season, by cactus and herbs.

Derrubada não! wishes to keep trace of this experience, according to complex audio-visual modalities, working from the simultaneous disjunction and juxtaposition of different capture times of the terrain and its surroundings.

The film works with composite images in which the transcription of voices on the screen plays an important role. ?The music was composed by Thomas Köner with whom I had worked in the early 90s and early 2000s on several installation and performance projects.
This project benefited from an artist grant of Funcultura Governo do Estado de Pernambuco.

Yann Beauvais

CRACK by Emilia Izquierdo

CRACK explores the cosmic and the political through paradox. The work investigates our relationship with technology using footage from global political events, colonialism, technological warfare and animations from classic film history. Mixing hand drawn animation, archival footage, classic film sources and sound the piece explores issues of responsibility, narcissism and politics.

OBJECTS AND ARTIFACTS by Viktor Brim

White fog is slowly moving from left to right. A man cleans his workwear from a vanishing distance with an air hose. Three trembling steel cables emerge from a grey metal building. A large dump truck with a full load passes by. In a deeply green forest landscape there is a dark monolith. You can hear jingling metal noises from the off, which cause a spreading echo. A white cargo helicopter is slowly approaching for landing. A dredger moves in a circle on the surface of the water. In OBJECTS AND ARTIFACTS, various pictorial elements come into contact with each other in a situational manner and create a friction surface that deals with forms of a post-apocalyptic landscape.

NIDDER by Stanley Schtinter

Nuclear tensions escalate resulting in the targeted destruction of Menwith Hill, an American surveillance base located in Nidderdale, North Yorkshire.
In the months following, a Sufi Islamic brotherhood begin work on an album of music in tribute to the people and landscape of Nidderdale.
This film explores the making of the album, incorporating local archival materials which may have inspired its creation.

ÁGUA FORTE by Mónica Baptista

Strong Waters (Água Forte) is a film made on a trip to the Amazon rainforest (from February to May 2015), rescuing a series of encounters.
With a structuralist metric, this film consists of 5 reels of 16mm hand-processed film and lasts approximately 15 minutes.
In the beginning of the film we listen to the myth of the Creation from the Corripaco, indigenous people of the Amazon (Brazil, Colombia and Peru), in which the first God, the God Principle, living in a vertical and silent world, sees his excrements emerging from the deep waters - the navel of the world.
Strong Waters follows the course of a river, intersecting different times, the mythologic and the essay - proper of travel journals –, drawing together with the landscape a horizontal thought and finally collapsing into a wild object born from the unconscious.

KANAL by Drazen Zanchi

Boats are entering in the Split harbor. Each sequence is a maneuver: slow and continuous. Nevertheless, boats and their movements become more and more difficult to recognize because the image is drawn in fluctuations of its physical elements. Textures of bulky light layers and grainy grey noises are confounded with the soundtrack. The latter is articulated around the touch, i.e. local and non-propagating formations grafted on thick resonant and tonal substrate.

V5 (ZIP-ZAP) by Christian Lebrat

V5 (Zip-Zap) progresses via a tight, interweaving montage of rapid sequences, which were filmed directly from a CRT TV screen.

CENIZA VERDE (GREEN ASH) by Pablo Mazzolo

CENIZA VERDE tries to recover the mythical vestiges of the aboriginal culture Henia/Kamiare, annihilated by the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century.

The Henia/Kamiares inhabited the current territory of the Sierras de Córdoba (Argentina) for at least 5000 years. After resisting the conquerors in the Charalqueta hill (named after the God of Joy), women, children, and the elderly committed suicide from the top of this hill in order to avoid being enslaved. This was the most massive collective suicide in the territory currently known as Argentina. The hill was renamed Colchiqui, (after the God of Fate and Sadness).

The film is a phantasmagoric trip within this geographical extension, taking it as a vast, green cemetery.

AGENS - Lyoudmila Milanova & Steffi Lindner

The video work AGENS deals with the nature of ephemeral substances and their immanent processes, thus approaching the contrast between the materiality of fleetingness and the human need for control and rather clear forms.

The narrative structure as a whole is based on the development process of a cloud in the sky: from its slow formation via the agglomeration to its disappearance and reappearance somewhere else. The running time of the video matches more or less the life span of a cumulus cloud.

I, APOSTATE - Jeremy Moss

A fantasia of post-indoctrination, "I, Apostate" is an experimental documentary that revisits and examines a collection of personal memories, ancestries, religious figures, and diverse landscapes constructing a kinetic series of connected fragments. The filmmaker was raised in the Mormon church and the film, in the form of a visual essay, maps his inward journeys of indoctrination, conversion, apostasy, and beyond onto his own and his ancestors' outward pilgrimages from pastoral landscapes in Ireland, England, Sweden, and the American midwest to Utah deserts by way of palm-lined towns in northeastern Brazil.

CITY SYMPHONY SERIES (2 NEW PARTS) - Dominic Angerame

I have been working on two projects that are part of my City Symphony series. One project focuses on welders. The film was shot in high contrast black & white 16mm film. It shows graphic details of welders performing their work. It shows both representational and abstract imagery such as sparks, flames and smoke. This is filmed similarly to my other work, utilizing super impositions, flash frames and high contrast. The other project is my filming of the last metal scrapyard in San Francisco. This material, also shot in 16mm, is exploring the textures of metal and the persons working in the scrapyard.

A BOAT APPEARED OUT OF THE FOG, THEN AFTER A MINUTE ANOTHER. - Julie Murray

In the current environment film can be now reshaped into any number of alternative cinematic forms, whilst preserving intact the original itself. What used to be a physical intrusion with consequences, a knife to the emulsion, the cut has now become a rhetorical gesture in a ubiquitous digital work flow. Audience and artist alike are accustomed to the limitless non-destructive dispersal of infinitely malleable digital packets. As result, the quotidian film frame must surely now be perceived in a fundamentally changed way.

2017
IN THE BACKWARD OF TIME - Danilo Torre

This work is inspired by the city symphony film genre, attempting a sort of review in a post-modern documentary style. The title is a verse from W. Shakespeare's "The Tempest," which tells the story of Prospero, the wizard and the real Duke of Milan.
Following the manipulations of Prospero, the film uses cinematographic 'tricks” such as time shifts, flashback and visual abstractions to describe the development of the city of Milan through its architecture. It ends with a view of the "Seven Heavenly Palaces" a monumental opera by Ansel Kiefer, a détournement of a tridimensional artwork: the monumental
opera becomes a vision of the future, or a hypothetical parallel world.

LA MUE - Matt Frenot

Through displays of transparency and opacy, the color green transforms the urban space into a composition. Its subtle movements bring still images into the present moment. By introducing a temporal dimension into the film, the material changes the perspective of the city. The gaze focuses on near and distant fragments as the viewer traverses the East-West axis crossing the center of Shanghai.

Across photography and cinema, La Mue is a project that conceives five visual and sound screens display.

LES ETABLISSEMENTS PHONOGRAPHIQUES DE L’EST - Yves-Marie Mahé

From 1988 to 1994, near Père Lachaise cemetery on the eastern side of Paris, the Etablissements phonographiques de l’Est (Eastern Phonographic Venue), aka EPE, was a multidisciplinary venue hosting the crême de la crême of the international experimental, radical, industrial, noise, avant-punk scene… A record shop during the day, an underground venue at night hosting in its basement gigs, performances, screenings of video art and experimental cinema, readings, bondage workshops, fanzine exhibitions…
At the junction of late 80’s and early 90’s, EPE saw the end of industrial music and the birth of the still highly influential avant-punk scene.

TROPICS - Mathilde Lavenne

TROPICS is an archaeological expedition orbiting a Mexican farm. Traversing matter, the film freezes time, people, elements and draws the ghost of a lost paradise.

LES PETITS OUTILS - Emmanuel Piton

One morning where nothing starts. I discover the rubble of a recent past: an old foundry completely ripped open on the edge of a small village in Brittany. Over the course of a passage, a crossing, I draw the contours of this space. This is a film about oblivion, about modern ruins, a political film in which the foundry comes to symbolize the upheavals of the working world, the society that stirs us, and the unceasing acceleration of progress...

WATNA - Micol Roubini & Lorenzo Casali

Watna is a film on the perception of time and space: a meticulous scan of the variations of the central European landscape, observed through the slow, steady and restless navigation pace of a cargo boat. The film portrays the daily routine in a workplace, the barge named Watna, home for the owners as well as a means of transport.

ÉCHOS - Lise Fischer & Pali Meursault

In the heart of a mountain valley, facing an imposing cliff, a sound engineer captures the sonic landscape.
These recordings will soon be amplified and transfigured by an exceptional sound system.

MIROIR DANS LE PRÉ - Ira Vicari

In the middle of the night I saw myself in a mirror laying in the grass and suddenly my head was among the clouds of the sky.

LEFTOVERS - Christopher Steel

Leftovers – for this project I will be colour grading and remixing digital versions of mostly old 16mm short films on various subjects:  
A film about Gothenburg: Ferry Good.
A crime film: STOP EATING OUR SWANS.
Two films about protest: NOlympics (it didn’t work) and Kettled.
Queuing to watch tennis: They came to SW19.
A cooking film: My Grandad Killed Your Grandad, Doodah Doodah.
I filmed a US pavement in First Contact and an Italian pavement in La Grassa; the latter is my latest and the first I've made with a phone.

JOURNAL CHINOIS - Johanna Pauline Maier

A diary filmed almost 20 years ago in a China that does not exist anymore. Voices that sounded differently at that time give form to an alternative perception of time. The film describes an endangered world which has almost disappeared throughout the gaze of the very young woman I was at that time - a gaze that doesn't exist anymore.

DEEP WATERS by Alice Heit

An immersion into the mysterious continent of female pleasure, DEEP WATERS explores the "fountains" that sometimes flow at the moment of a woman's sexual pleasure. A phenomenon which remains largely unknown, not least by women themselves…

Separated from our bodies and our desires due to centuries of patriarchal oppression, the continent of female pleasure often remains a terra incognita.

DEEP WATERS opens up one of those rare and precious spaces where speech is liberated and shared…

We travel through an imaginary "in rhizomes", allowing ourselves to explore and play, driven by a profound aspiration to recover a female sexuality that is rich and joyful, as it retraces its way toward its depths.

AGAINST TAΥLOR - Alexia Chevrollier

CONTRE TAYLOR (AGAINST TAYLOR) presents a certain vision of a manual savoir-faire: the making of charcoal. Traditional charcoal burners are becoming rare. There are only a few left in France. The disappearance of this profession means that the craft will eventually be forgotten.

The man who is filmed builds and unbuilds his work, following a productive logic. If one puts Taylor’s writings into practice, the craftsman is stripped of the meaning of his production. But here, one mastered gesture comes after the other without being explained. The viewer thus becomes alienated whereas the worker recovers all his power. His gestures and his experience are fascinating; hard to understand, they become almost absurd for the viewer. Meditative images blur the frontier between reality and fiction.

Alexia Chevrollier criticizes the industrial system and creates the conditions of possibility to think the status of the craftsman. His obvious loneliness reveals a link between the work, the body and the location. The craftsman’s gesture is related to that of an artist. His work becomes an oeuvre, a sculpture.

11 TRAILS - FLATFORM

A bus trip. Three cameras, placed in correspondence of each door, recompose the view from the inside towards the outside. The vision is in flashes, in the short span of pause at bus stops. The landscape outside and its characters seem to elude us once we do not fix them with pictures or words.

11 TRAILS by FLATFORM challenges this elusion and the impossibility that constructs – in the absence of words and images– a collection of short stories, barely mentioned but yet so close to reality.

DENDROMACY - Karine Bonneval

Dendromacy, in intimacy with trees, is a project realized with an ecophysiologist on its fields of study. It is inspired by scientific protocols in an attempt to make perceptible an invisible relationship between man and tree. The trees produce gaseous exchanges with the atmosphere, like the whole plant world. This respiration is much slower and diffuse than that of human beings. The film seeks to make these two respiratory modes dialogue.

Dendromacy proposes an experience of an empirical nature to the spectator. It comes in three parts that correspond to types of camera functions and induce different chromatics and image rhythms. These colors and these pulsations are modified according to the interaction between the man and the plant. A hand on the bark leaves its imprint, the breathing of the character like that of the trunk becomes perceptible ...

The shots were made with a cooled lens thermal camera which is normally used to detect CO2 leakage on industrial sites. This project was carried out in collaboration with Claire Damesin and was supported by Diagonale Paris-Saclay and FLIR company.

The editing was done in collaboration with Gabrielle Reiner. Jean-Michel Ponty's original soundtrack was created from prepared wood instruments and sounds from wood.

PROXIMA B - Giulia Grossmann

A meditative exploration in a desolate natural environment that appears to emerge from a new world, this film confronts the landscape with music and poetry.
We travel through the glaciers and lava fields of a forming world unspoiled by human activity.

Odyssey - Sabine Groenewegen

A Remarkable Odyssey by Sabine Groenewegen is a work intersecting sci-fi, found footage collage and essay film exploring how colonial logic has influenced sense of self and others and questions the extent to which these frames of perception have been decolonized today.

2016
BLACK POND - Jessica Sarah Rinland

BLACK POND takes place in the diverse ecosystem of a Common in the South of England. The film explores the colonization of land, repetition of organism data collection, letters enquiring about hurricanes and complaining of squirrel shootings, agrarian and military histories, waiting for a moth to be found, pausing for a leaf, hands studying the migrant bat, depressions caused by aircraft, cassette-tape cases trapping and releasing a butterfly, a young boy skating on a frozen pond.

FENDRE LES FLOTS - Christophe Guérin

This film project came into being as part of a residency program for artists originating from Le Havre, which was inaugurated for the 500th anniversary of the city's founding. For me it was an opportunity to evoke the maritime vocation of this port city, and so I decided to film my experience of a transatlantic crossing in a cargo ship. And so began my nautical residency, which took place in a paradoxical space – simultaneously fixed and enclosed (a shipping container 197 meters long by 30 meters wide) and in constant motion across the infinity of the ocean.

42 days toward Central America onboard the CMA CGM Fort Ste Marie: Le Havre (France), Kingston (Jamaica), Carthagena (Colombia), San Tomas (Guatemala), Puerto Cortes (Honduras), Puerto Limon port de Moin (Costa Rica), Kingston (Jamaica), Rotterdam (Holland), Hambourg (Germany), Anvers (Belgium), Le Havre (France).

To keep a ship's logbook means to record significant events or to note nothing in particular within the flux of days that follow each other. This imperative – to keep note – when it applies to the visual and the aural, forces one to become a keen observer, to keep one's ears open, to be hyperpresent. Therefore, to describe my approach I borrow from the maritime vocabulary: a film logbook.

DES 30 GLORIEUSES AUX 40 VOLEURS – JOURNAL MOUVEMENTÉ - Yv Dymen

Using 40 years' worth of my own materials: filmic (photochemical / analog / digital); photographic (photochemical / digital); plastic (drawing / painting / sculpture), I endeavor a sensory chronicle dating from the "Height of the 2nd Millenium" to the "Low of the 3rd".

Its premise deals with the overlap... of hours, days, centuries, societies, technologies, reference points... in which elements cover each other, interweave, superimpose, entwine, reemerge, evolve, construct, deconstruct. Techniques as well as practices, references and influences, failures, thresholds, current events, joys, sorrows, desires, accelerations, returns, standstills, doubts, utopias, lies...

The aim is to synthesize this material, these "fades", these dubitable "accelerations": industrial, technical, technological, through a "lived-image". I work toward a sort of "narrative in motion" or "narrative-image" which renders visible, ultimately and paradoxically, the tread of time, if not the tread of humanity (Sisyphus' neurosis multiplied to infinity).

DAS GESTELL - Philip Widmann

DAS GESTELL is an experimental essay based on the Japanese fascination for the thought of German philosopher Martin Heidegger and interpretations of his works on the relation between humans and technology.

The film shows landscapes, spaces and situations that display the permeation of a region and a society by technology. DAS GESTELL is mainly set in the second biggest urban agglomeration of Japan, the Kansai region between the cities of Kyoto, Osaka and Kobe. 

Shot on Super 8, the film images evoke an incertitude as to which time they belong to. Their graininess points toward the past while some of them appear as if they were from a parallel future, one that did not originate in our current present. Likewise, the letters, biographical trivia, and philosophical texts that make for the source material of the subtitles of the work, originated in the 20th century but transcend time in both directions. The writings’ motivations and their underlying stereotypes of what is considered specifically German and what is considered genuinely Japanese point towards darker days past, while revealing the banal proof of a timeless inability of dealing with the Other.

BIRDS BARK - Caroline Pellet

Birds bark is inhabited by dogs, cats, beetles, ants, parrots, humans, snails, chickadees, worms. These beings appear as shadows, stains, abstract forms, projections, in a kind of ventriloquist image. These beings imitate, hunt, love each other and engage with, hide from and play with each other. The one making noises is not who you think it is; dialogues punctuate these noises, from the man imitating birds in front of a hilarious audience to this girl asking questions about prehistorical dragonflies and the concomitant existence of mosquitos, or this man making his dog resolve math equations, and this group of people trying to identify a nocturnal insect.

The film is crossed by duplication and imitation through the choice of "indirect" images and "noisist" sounds, forming a strange bestiary in which humans are just a part of.

FROM STALINGRAD TO JAURÈS - Louise Crawford

When I shot "From Stalingrad to Jaurès", it was not the physical but the imaginary journey between those two metro stations that I was interested in.

"From Stalingrad to Jaurès" was shot many years ago in Paris. After many years, it is a return to black and white 16mm single screen film for me and a return to the image of the male torso, that I first used in my film "Claiming Territory" in 1993. I wanted to capture modern-day Paris and its traditions - the baguette, its history - the French Revolution, its film culture - Godard and mix it up with some crime jazz.

HOTEL BARDO - Stanley Schtinter

"I bowed three times in front of the great collector and disappeared into my picture."

Painter, poet, shaman, spy: an invocation of the artist sometimes known as Brion Gysin. A film designed to produce a specific effect in the age of low attention and full disclosure, about a man who dedicated his life and work to making people see and think according to their own, infinite means.

THE PLACE I WILL HAVE LEFT - Lena Ditte Nissen

“Identifying with cannibalistic diets and moralities to enclose myself as an ever-changing unity of hunger, lost appetite and a vision of my future flesh.”

Close to the Rio Catatumbo, close to the border to Colombia, the most lightnings in the world strike down. Nearly every night in an area of about 100m2 you can witness hour-long thunderstorms. The people living in the area have not only experienced natural violent forces throughout their lives, but have also been in-between armed conflicts between Colombian para-military, guerrilla and Venezuelan military and organized crime.

TEST - Louise Crawford & Stéphan Guéneau

The idea of the film is simple, three screens are occupied by three different characters - a teddy bear, a person, the letters of the word TEST - all of them executing a certain number of figures - circles, spirales, vertical and horizontal crossings on the images, etc. They are filmed in animation. Each sequence is rigorously timed (to the number of frames) in order to achieve a perfect synch between them. A fourth element comes to disrupt this coordination by gradually intruding between sequences and from the first to the third screen in a chaos of dust and explosion. It’s video footage capturing the demolition of a social buildings complex in a Glasgow neighborhood at a time when so-called disadvantaged districts throughout Europe were being renovated in the 90s. Once this sequence ends, the synch is re-established until it is disrupted again. Only one out of the three films, the one on the central screen, is in black-and-white. The disrupting black-and-white element intrudes the films in color and vice-versa.

LE CIRQUE - Elsa Abderhamani

We’re lost in flower fields. Cars move around a vast, sunbathed wasteland. Our eye catches characters who seem captivated by this place, by a landscape between the city and the wild nature. They are taking photos of themselves, posing in front of trees, ruins, lawn. Gradually, hints emerge and define our location. But what should we look at? Toward which direction?

What is this place? We’re in the city, in the countryside, in which country? Enormous flower beds are circled by endless cars, the traffic is heavy. Games of light and shadow form strange images which challenge the geographical and temporal landmarks. Surprising sounds are associated with sequences of people disappearing in the landscape. Others are resting on banks. We are wondering where we are. Figures are slowly becoming more precise. There are tourists, curious ones, actors repeating their roles as gladiators.

But we are still wondering where we are.

KAIROS - Stefano Canapa

KAIROS is a dancing film-poem, a walk on the shores of the Mediterranean, which evokes the disappearance of the myth of the Sirens as well as the odyssey of migrants, between exile and resistance.
For the Greeks, the Kairos designates this fugitive moment when everything is decided, the tipping point, the window that opens and into which one must enter in order to seize the opportunity.

OCEAN HILL DRIVE - Miriam Gossing and Lina Sieckmann

Ocean Hill Drive examines a rare phenomenon, the so-called ‚shadowflicker’, that occurs in a suburban area on the outskirts of Boston. As a result of an erroneously installed wind turbine, the flicker effect, which brings to mind structuralist experimental cinema, appears instead in documentary images showing the landscape and architecture of a Massachusetts coast town.
The film focuses on the visual quality of the pulsating shadows that intrude the suburban domestic sphere and disrupt the social and psychological equilibrium of the community.
Documentary images are complemented with a female voiceover, which is based on multiple interviews that were transcripted and assembled into a single narration. The film slowly uncovers fragmentary memories from the time when the flicker began. An atmosphere of suspense and intangible fear is generated throughout the film, while the actual source of the flickering lights remains unknown.

2015
Quelque chose se trame! d'Olivier FOUCHARD

Sounds Like - PETER MILLER

TIMANFAYA - PHILIPPE COTE

Lanzarote, a volcanic island in the Canaries, was shaped during the 18th century by a series of eruptions. The island's mineral, semi-desertic landscapes preserve a memory of this history.

In 2015, I traversed this area in search of a cataclysm. In this ravaged land, I saw the tentative beginnings of a return to life.

Timanfaya, Philippe Cote, 2015, Super 8, Color & Black and white, Sound, Text read by Violeta Salvatierra - 25'

1985 - GAETAN BESNARD

1985 refers to the last year that the lake was drained. It is a memorial trace of childhood. Some fog, dead trees, dwellings, a few piano keys, abandoned boats. It is a dreamlike, fluid poem which contemplates a mental landscape and an absence within a tangible organic cycle. It is a proportionless sensory journey. It is a bitter-tasting portrait-in-time of an intoxicating beauty.

BODY SNATCHER de Benjamin Ramírez Pérez

BODY SNATCHER

The film works with newly-created 16mm film as well as with found footage from Barbara Loden‘s film Wanda (1970), conflating fragments from the film itself and the new material into an abstract narrative:Objects, props and surfaces from the film were recreated, visually isolated and refilmed, taking on a sculptural and artificial notion.

In a kind of vacuum, an abstract and associative narration about emptiness, failure, and identity construction in relation to the body slowly unfolds. A sort of science fiction remake of Wanda emerges - a layer of meaning that lies behind the film‘s plot and surface is imagined and constructed, positioning disparate elements in relation to each other and forging enigmatic connections between them.

Beat the Operating System - Laurie O'Brien

The film is about our world that has become increasing more connected and also more distant. The project began last year by working with a photo archive in Rochester, New York, home of Kodak. People from the 20's, 30's and 40's are placed in our own era by giving them cell phones, computers and jet planes and forcing them to live in the digital age. All of the images are from the Soibelman News Agency Archive courtesy of Visual Studies Workshop.

The project began by sending images and ideas to writer Doug Harvey and he sent back text using a variety of "paracritical Interrogation Technique -- real world implication of Alfred Jarry's science of pataphysics which pre-existing texts are subject to extreme stress to reveal their hidden meaning. The texts inspired me to create a set collages that were then animated at the Light Cone Residency Atelier 105.

In this way, the filmmaking process mimics the complexity of our desire to connect with people through distance, translations, and corruptions using images, music and language.

MUES by Daniel Nehm

Works and Days: The Sisyphus Files - Mariana Christofides

For the multi-part film essay “Works and Days: The Sisyphus Files” the artist has been recursively visiting the Balkans for the past four years seeking out sites along borders lying by rivers and lakes, where the course of the boundary remains uncertain. After having lost the entire first block of footage, the data on the hard drive not being retrievable, she sets out anew, only to witness that the places do not exist anymore in the same way. The topography changes from year to year insomuch that landscapes seem to vanish and observations antiquate. The approach of the film extends accordingly, so that it now focuses on the loss of images – internal and external. The project itself gets into flow: As a recurring attempt of approaching – the very constant failure and beginning anew within this process becomes part of a poetic narrative.