|
Selections from TIE: The International Experimental
Cinema Exposition
2007
Wexner
Center for the Arts - Columbus, Ohio Edition
Introduced by TIE founder/director Christopher May
Thu,
May 10, 2007 | 7:00PM
Since
2000, the Colorado-based TIE festival has been a leading champion
of artists still working in the medium of film, with a particular
focus on new and historical avant-garde cinema. This program, specifically
selected for the Wexner Center by TIE founder/director Christopher
May, features an eclectic range of short films that show the continuing
vitality and beauty of celluloid.
"The
phrase “film festival” has become a misnomer as most
contemporary festivals show some (or most) of their selections on
video. The Colorado-based TIE festival is one of the last true FILM
festivals in operation. Since 2000, TIE has been a leading champion
of artists still working in the medium of film, with a particular
focus on new and historical avant-garde cinema."
- Chris Stults, Wexner Center for the Arts
Official
Program:
Blocking
(Pablo Marin, 2005, 2 mins., 35mm, Argentina)
"Made
strictly by opposing AMIA’s “Disaster Recovery for Films
in Flooded Areas” this film was kept under water until its
emulsion started to melt, then removed, tightened up and finally
dried directly by the sun. The result is what you see, a film trailer,
reborn from its very same ashes, in which the few small portions
of “images” that remain are overcome by the freed, colorful
chemicals. Blocking is, thus, an homage to all the footage
lost by the unpredictable dangers of nature and, at the same time,
a true song to the beauty in destruction."
"Blocking
brings together two of the Avant-garde’s favorite preoccupations:
found footage film, and physical manipulation of the medium itself.
The found footage in Blocking, comes from a theatrical
trailer for a large budget feature film. Subtitles contextualize
the footage as originating in a non-Spanish-speaking country. To
achieve its wonderful optical quality, Marin soaked the film in
water long enough for it to start breaking down. The effect is visually
sublime. The image in the film is almost totally obliterated, freeing
the dyes to wash over the celluloid. The effect bears a remarkable
resemblance to the painting technique developed by Max Ernst known
as Frottage, in its web-like formations. Inexplicably, the subtitling
of the film somehow escapes total erosion. Spanish phrases flicker
in and out of the ominous oozing color formations, adding elements
of human structure to the nebulous articulations of form and color."
-Noah Manos, TIE
"Stunning,
important, exciting, lovely."
– Christopher May, TIE
"Wonderful,
very radical experimental cinema. It is beautiful to see the pigments
in freedom and then a flash, a glimpse of the image where they come
from."
– Claudio Caldini, Filmmaker
#23.2 Book
of Mirrors
(Joost Rekveld, 2002, 12 mins., 35mm, Netherlands)
#23.2 Book of Mirrors deals with the multiplication of
light beams through mirrors and kaleidoscopes. The structure of
the film has been developed in close cooperation with composer Rozalie
Hirs who wrote the music for it. The composition is based on symmetries
and inversions of proportions and gestures throughout the film.
At some point #23 will have grown to be a cycle of five
abstract films about light, inspired by concepts found in medieval
and renaissance optics. The films are made with a set-up in which
I use elementary optical principles to generate images. These images
are caused by the interplay of light waves directly onto the emulsion,
not using lenses as they are used normally to reproduce a scene
outside of the camera. In that way I try to explore alternative
forms of spatiality not related to traditional pictorial perspective.
Black
and White Trypps Number Two
(Ben Russell, 2006, 8 mins., 16mm, U.S.A.)
"A fine fine example of spaces between existing as objects
themselves. A patternistic and memorializing offering to natural
totems. Two kinds of reversal at play involving black and white
as well as reflection and overlap. These simple elements create
a hurried maze of twisting antler branches, twigs, and dissected
slices of pure “space.” I can hear the crackling fires,
echoing elk calls and frosty despair…"
- JT Rogstad, TIE
Vom Innen; von aussen
(Albert Sackl, 2006, 20 mins., 16mm, Austria)
"Von Innen, von Aussen is a wonderfully unnerving,
scrutinized, study of the human body within the context of its environment.
The film opens with an empty apartment set in motion, revolving
around a fixed point. This introduces the kinetic fixation that
Sackl explores thoroughly within the film, the revolution. Implications
of the revolution within man's own self image and man's historic
worldview seem to be the larger conceptual concerns of the work.
The revolution is then applied to man, himself, where Sackl plays
out in a score of variations on the theme. At first, we see an unidentified
nude male subject revolving clockwise on his central axis in front
of a black background. It is evident that the backdrop is part of
the apartment, but it clear that Sackl intends it to be an empirical
environment for one portion of his study. Sackl then sets the revolving
man in motion back and forth across the face of the backdrop. Sackl
continues his formal investigation sending the revolving man back
and forth in space.
The
next major development is that the image splits and we view the
man in stereo. The two men's revolutions are synchronized at first,
then each takes on his own timing and direction. At this point the
viewer could easily define the film as simply a visual analysis
of the male figure in highly ordered motion, but then Sackl presents
the environment as variable. Suddenly, the black background is lifted
and anonymous natural background is presented. The landscape is
initially vacant, but the spinning man soon enters stage right and
makes his way back and forth, revolving all the while. The film
soon cuts back to the black background where more variations are
played out, the most noteworthy being the superimposition of the
man's front and back. The visual biomorphism is totally bizarre.
Throughout the remainder of the film, the environment continues
to shift between the apartment, natural landscapes and the black
backdrop. In the end, the empiricism of the blackened space is beautifully
tainted by rays of sunlight that are projected onto the scene from
a window behind the camera.
Ultimately,
the film has a truly meditative quality, a meditation that encompasses
our notions about our bodies and the rules that govern it, both
environmental and self-imposed. The precision of the filmmaking
is overwhelming, in a way that is echoed in the movements of the
male model. Something within the tight order applied to the man's
body brings to mind the iconic work of Leonardo de Vinci, which
imposes perfect geometries atop the human form."
-Noah Manos, TIE
Starlings
(Karl Kels, 1991, 6 mins., 16mm, Germany)
"It is night. The moon is shining. A static camera captures
a huge flock of starlings searching the sky in circular movements.
It is not clear how long Kels had been standing there before he
turned on his camera; the event as such can only have come as a
surprise to him as well. At first the starlings are hard to identify.
Having deliberately edited frames coming from different generations
of the original print in a certain metrical order, without changing
the actual chronology of their movement, Kels has the constantly
changing shapes of the birds dissolve in the rough grain of the
celluloid. Once again a technical weakness of the celluloid forms
the starting point of his visual enterprise. Shot on one reel without
any interruption, the birds' flight gradually forms configurations
of astonishing beauty. An immense sense of depth emerges as the
starlings move against the background of the distanced moon, yet
cross close by electric wires. Moths cannot resist the light and
drop down just in front of the lens, and finally, also the starlings
seem to take a last turn reaching down closer to Kels' camera just
before his reel ends."
- Millenium Film Journal, No. 30-31.
Upper
Blue Lake
(James Otis, 1996, 12 mins., 16mm, U.S.A.)
"Coming to grips with landscape via pseudo-hyper-stereoscopy.
Your eyes are two-and-a-half inches apart, giving viscerally felt
depth to 25 feet. If your eyes were 400 feet apart, you'd see solid
forms three miles distant and think your grasp extended a mile.
I established pairs of viewpoints up to hundreds of feet apart and
jogged between, at each shooting a few frames. Since usual depth
perception is only to 25 feet, we see anything in stereo as within
that distance; mountains are seen as close and, hence, small. Filming
took days and days: time, too, is miniaturized; shadows creep and
clouds boil. Experience land as diorama and time as summary. UPPER
BLUE LAKE.... so enthralled me with its various qualities of light
and atmosphere, I persevered, for five years jogging whenever I
could, 12,000 feet high in the Colorado Rockies."
The General Returns from One Place to Another
(Michael Robinson, 2006, 11 mins., 16mm, U.S.A.)
"Learning to love again, with fear at its side, the film draws
balance between the romantic and the horrid, shaping a simultaneously
skeptical and indulgent experience of the beautiful. A Frank O'Hara
monologue (from a play of the same title) attempts to undercut the
sincerity of the landscape, but there are stronger forces at play."
Living
(Frans Zwartjes, 1971, 15 mins., 16mm, Netherlands)
Zwartjes' masterwork and his most favorite film. "Living has
an uneasy, indefinable atmosphere. This strange swaying of the camera
and the music that keeps going on and on…" Living demonstrates
the cinematographic mastery of Zwartjes. He is the main character
of the film and handles the camera himself, pointing it towards
himself with his hand held out. Zwartjes: "I was as strong
as a bear in these times." The film is part of the series 'Home
sweet home', in which Zwartjes explores the house in The Hague he
had just moved into at the time. His wife and muse Trix plays the
other role. The two characters move restlessly through the house.
The film was made using an extreme wide angle lens (a 5.7), which
gives the image a strong sense of estrangement.
Fourth
Watch
(Janie Geiser, 2000, 11 mins., 16mm, U.S.A.)
The ancient Greeks divided the night into four sections; the last
section before morning was called the fourth watch. In these hours
before dawn, an endless succession of rooms is inhabited by silent
film figures occupying flickering space in a midcentury house made
of printed tin. Their presence is at once inevitable and uncanny.
A boy turns his head in dread, a woman’s eyes look askance,
a sleepwalker reaches into a cabinet which dissolves with her touch,
and hands write letters behind disappearing windows. The rooms reveal
themselves and fill with impossible, shadowed light. It is not clear
who is watching and who is trespassing in this nocturnal drama of
lost souls.
Dipping
Sause
(Luther Price, 2005, 10 mins., 16mm, U.S.A.)
"Epileptic static strain into grays of machancal fetish tube
socks and kenetic clown S and M cascading objects caress and fondle."
Ingreen
(Nathaniel Dorsky, 1964, 12 mins., 16mm, U.S.A.)
Ingreen is a reflecting pool of the underwater involvement
of a mother-father-son relationship. Dorsky's first film quickly
gained wide notoriety and respect. Yet, it was expelled from awards
consideration at the Ann Arbor Film Festival due to its highly controversial
auto-erotic content while presiding judge, Gregory Markopoulos,
in solidarity with the film, walked out in protest.
Happy-End
(Peter Tscherkassky, 1996, 12 mins., 35mm, Austria)
"A
found footage film about oral rituals, about festive occasions and
about a married couple who understood how to enrich and enliven
their cosy togetherness. We see the pair pouring drinks, cutting
cakes, making toasts... Finally the exuberant movement of the dancing
woman freezes. It is a deeply ambiguous moment that, from the expression
on her face, allows one to think of something close to despair.
On something like a modern, alienated, baroque vanity motive, which
is still present in the Austrian tradition, and whose abrasion with
the sensual certainty of the moment of drinking an egg liqueur gives
Happy-End a wider meaning."
- Bert Rebhandl
Program
curated by Christopher May
__________________________________________
To
schedule a TIE Retrospective
for your organization, please
contact us at:
303-832-2387
___________________________________________
|
|
|
