Sublime Moments DAS MODELL, Florian Gwinner (GERMANY 2006, video, 06:14 min) The pavement is made of cardboard. The cookies are the pavement. The chair is a chair. About the construction of reality. REMOTE, Martin Brand (THE NETHERLANDS 2007, 12:30 min) A stranger’s apartment, some skater kids in the park, as well as people and situations randomly observed on the street form the background in front of which Remote takes place. The observing and the cinematic and photographic recording of persons give rise to a personal, essay-like approach to an area between close and far, familiar and unfamiliar, private and public. Remote was produced within the framework of a Impakt Works/EMARE residency with the support of the City of Utrecht. OCNOPHILIA, Manon Bovenkerk (THE NETHERLANDS 2006, 5:30 min) Two women, one seemingly no longer amongst the living, play a game of attracting and repelling in claustrophobic rooms and hallways. The outside is a desolate landscape of stark and unforgiving architecture. Inside, the desperate need for contact leads to physical obsession, strange infections and croup-like tumors. This visceral horror story is constructed entirely out of precise and refined charcoal drawings; movement is suggested by slight camera movements and the gloomy soundtrack. Ocnophilia, meaning an extreme attachment to certain objects and persons, is also the title of the book published simultaneously with the film, which uses the same drawings to arrive at a ‘sequential narrative’. MICHAEL JACKSON FIVE, Ola Vasiljeva (THE NETHERLANDS 2006, 15:35 min) ‘Michael Jacksons Five’ is a sequence of evocatively distorted narratives. Ola places her main character - Michael Jackson - in a slightly askew, pseudo-religious sphere. Floating through the enigmatic and endlessly magical properties of his surrounding, Michael Jackson is centered as a divine figure, his image heavily loaded with mystical ornaments, geometry and sacred signs. JED'S OTHER POEM(Beautiful Ground), Steward Smith & Jeff Bernier (USA 2005, video, 03:03 min) Jeddy-3, a humanoid robot built from spare parts, is a recurring character in Grandaddy’s 2000 album “The Sophtware Slump”. According to Grandaddy, before Jed’s system crashed he wrote poems. Poems for no one. “Jed’s Other Poem (Beautiful Ground)” is a music video for Grandaddy’s song of the same name. It was programmed entirely in Applesoft BASIC on a 1979 Apple – with 48k RAM – a computer so old it only types in capitals and has no up or down arrow keys, hard drive, or mouse. The video’s source code is available for downloading as text, audio transmission, or emulator disk image. It is the first open source music video. THE HYRCYNIUM WOOD, Ben Rivers (UNITED KINGDOM 2005, 3:00 min) The film began as a document of abandoned farms in South East England, but went off on a tangent, exploring the collision between the real and the imagined, and the hope of creating a hermetic world within that. The work also attempts to merge a marginalized, uncommercial approach to filmmaking with the spectacular and consequent mass appeal, of Cinemascope! This continues the use of cinematic reference in my work as a way of involving the audience, who come with their own set of references, and expectations to be confounded. I found the title in an out of date Thesaurus looking up the word ‘mystery’ – which is essentially what this film remains to me. (Ben Rivers) FATA MORGANA, Jeroen Kooijmans (THE NETHERLANDS 2006, 1:33 min) This is a short docu science fiction film that takes place in a typical Dutch landscape, with the waters of a lake reflecting the light of an invisible sun behind blades of grass and reeds and in the background, very far away, a windmill and a church spire. The sky turns dark and a heavenly light shines through a hole in the clouds, which very subtly changes the world as if by an unearthly force. THE DIVER, Nicolas Provost (BELGIUM 2006, 5:00 min) A lonely girl is approached by a shy boy on a moonlight balcony. Their longing is hampered by the mysteries of love in a burning night. The Diver is a neo-romantic audiovisual painting. A melodramatic experience that reaches for the viewer's subconscious cinematic and emotional memory. LIGHTNING BOLTS AND MAN HANDS, Markus Wambsganss (GERMANY 2004, video, 06:30 min) Humans have disappeared. A cat wanders around and suddenly enters a house. Inside everyone is dead. Then time gets rewound just to reveal what happened. The earth is quiet. NUMMER VIER, Guido van der Werve (THE NETHERLANDS 2005, video, 11:45 min) I don’t want to get involved in this, I don’t want to be part of this, talk me out of it. Some things are as inevitable as gravity, however much we would like to avoid them: something with which the subtitle of this short film whole-heartedly agrees. In ‘Nummer vier’, Guido van der Werve presents a contemporary form of spleen: nineteenth-century melancholy, mixed with Dutch sobriety and conceptual timing. Over and over again, we see an unlikely scene unfolding against a picturesque, serene background. A man playing a piano on a raft in the middle of a smooth lake; a choir and orchestra performing a requiem on a ship under sail; someone falling from the sky. Nothing world-shattering, but these are the ingredients with which ‘Nummer vier’ introduces the important issues: nature, art, beauty, life, death. Subjects that no-one can avoid, neither as a human being nor as an artist, but that can be defied - just as gravity. |
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