festival.
August
Saturday 7th and Sunday 8th
15:00-22:00h
@ Draama-sali, Vaasa City Library
stunning live cinema performances and beautiful films
live cinema performances.
Conceptión - Sami van Ingen
live cinema performance Saturday 7.8 15:00-16:00h
Sami van Ingen’s live cinema performance “Conceptión” combines found footage and deconstructed elements of film projection, and live micro camera feed. The performance is a self-reflective and poetic investigation of the boundless meta archive of cinema. “The clash of these elements, all gathered from different directions, leads to a new unity, a new fiction.”
Sami van Ingen (FI) is a veteran in experimental Finnish film. He has worked as artist, lecturer and curator since the late 1980s. Van Ingen finished his doctoral studies in the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki in 2012. He often uses found footage in his works. His works have been seen in many national and international exhibitions and festivals over the years, including Tbilisi Triennial (2012), Kunsthalle Helsinki (2005) and Sara Hildén Art Museum in Tampere, Finland (2002).
Cyclone Tracery - Dianna Barrie & Richard Tuohy
live cinema performance Saturday 7.8 16:00-16:30h
double 16mm projection bi-pack in anamorphic, 2018
On Christmas eve in 1974, the city of Darwin in tropical northern Australia was devastated by Cyclone Tracy. In this expanded cinema piece, a single film print, featuring only concentric circles is bi-packed against itself in two 16mm projectors simultaneously The quadrupled image of circles is transformed into troubled patterns of pulsating and swirling interference and whaling sounds of tropical violence.
Dianna Barrie (AUS) found her way into moving image making as a middle ground between the pursuit of abstract music and philosophy. Ever pushing the limits of material film practice led to the establishment of nanolab in 2006. Dianna's film work could perhaps be characterised as 'direct chemical'. She was also a founding director of the Australian International Experimental Film Festival.
Richard Tuohy (AUS) began making works on super 8 in the late nineteen eighties. In 2006 he launched nanolab, a super 8 film processing laboratory. Tuohy's own works are firmly in the materialist tradition. An advocate for the possibilities of handmade cinema. His moving image work and film based performances have screened at venues including the Melbourne IFF,Rotterdam IFF, New York FF, Ann Arbor, Rencontres Internationales (Louvre) and Media City.
Quelques minutes de soleil après minuit - Xavier Quérel
live cinema performance Saturday 7.8 21:00-22:00h
16mm film projector, light, sound
Come and sit on the margins of traditional rules of cinema. Of course the basics are present: light, shutter, sound, screen, eye, brain, imagination. But conventions are overturned. The device is reversed, the projector becomes an instrument and the projectionist plays live in front of you. "Few minutes of sun after midnight" offers a unique experience. The precision of movements unfolds a universe on the edge, between dream and reality, intimacy and chaos. Celluloid teases you, wild and fleeting. Fluxes saturate. Suspension, fragile silence. Flashes wake, the mechanical devices scream. Our retinas become unfaithful and let themselves drown in a pure and ephemeral moment.
Xavier Quérel (FR) is active in different fields of experimental cinema, focusing on playing live film and light performances. Quérel considers the cinema projector as an instrument. Applying his experience in improvisation, he has developed specific techniques and ingenious manipulations, allowing him to play with the spontaneity of a musician. He co-founded "L'Atelier MTK", a collective ‘handcraft’ cinema laboratory in Grenoble.
KARVAT - Natalia Kozieł & Petteri Kalliomäki
live cinema performance Sunday 7.8 15:00-15:30h
There is a hair in the image, a disturbance in your movie experience, a scream in the world history.
The projectionist has fallen asleep and dreams of film which is like a battleground: love, hate, action…
but don’t wake him up, let the chaos take over instead.
Natalia Kozieł (FI/PL) is a visual artist based in Finland, with a practice originating in the worlds of painting and printmaking. Often changing in artistic scale, Kozieł works with large paintings, stamp-sized graphics, space projections and live cinema performance. Located at the intersection of print art, theatre and film, her projects utilise slides, film projectors and overhead projectors, making use of them as optical tools, through their powerful beams of light.
Petteri Kalliomäki (FI) is an artist based in Finland. After the digitalization of mainstream cinemas in 2012, he has concentrated solely on presenting and preserving films in analogue format. He is a film projectionist and programme planner at WHS Teatteri Union, Helsinki, and an archivist responsible for the foreign film collection of the National Audiovisual Institute. Kalliomäki does live cinema performances with his wife, visual artist Natalia Kozieł-Kalliomäki.
Pocket Cinema - kinoMANUAL
live cinema performance Sunday 7.8 16:00-16:45h
Pocket Cinema is our recent project, based on slide projectors from the analogue era, formerly known as Lanterna Magic. The projectors, modified by rotating devices, display specially designed slides, blended with extra shapes and colours. We often combine this list effect with digitally animated projection.
We started to explore the concept of multi source visual performance during the art residency at Filmverkstaden in February 2019.
For 10th anniversary of Filmverkstaden we will present 40 min synesthetic improvisation /Aga — vj and Maciek — dj/ using a unique, specially designed image mixer. It enables to remote control of multiple slide projectors.
kinoMANUAL (PL) is a small, independent audio-visual production house from Wrocław (Poland), established by the artists Aga Jarząb and Maciek Bączyk, focused on experimenting with moving image and sound. kinoMANUAL primarily explores analogue animation techniques like hand-drawing, cut-out or direct cinema. Enjoying the tactile contact with film and the production process itself, they create films and objects that correspond with a rich tradition of moving image, kinetic art and experimental cinema.
It Goes Without Saying - Greg Pope
live cinema performance Sunday 7.8 19:00-20:00h
it goes without saying
it stoops without dropping
it folds without creasing
it begs without crawling
it sniffs without dying
it dies without comment
it lies without cheating
cheats without meaning
it goes without saying
and pulls without pushing
it pushes the pullers
cleans all the washing
no kind of stopping
huffing and blowing
at four wind crossing
the turned out are turning
the tossed up are tossing
the burnt out are burning
it goes without saying
it says without going
an arm and a leg
and a face for the masking
a head that is hurting
the field keeps burning
sing it to sleep
all sleeping and moaning
the end of a page
without footer or header.
the margins are small
when the bed
dries the wetter
Greg Pope (NO/UK) is an artist and filmmaker based in Oslo, Norway. After dabbling in punk rock bands and absurdist performance, he founded film collective ‘Situation Cinema’ (Brighton 1986) and ‘Loophole Cinema’ (London, 1989). Working collaboratively and individually, Pope has made video installations, live art and single-screen film works since 1996.
film program I
Disappearing images/missing image / the archive, materiality of the analogue film/image, construction & deconstruction
Curated by Sarah Schipschack
showing Sunday August 8th 17:00-18:30h
Last Train
Dianna Barrie, Australia, Indonesia, 2016, 12:30 min, 16 mm
Found in the (now possibly lost) film archive at Lab Laba Laba, footage from a trailer for the 1981 Indonesian propaganda film ‘Kereta Api Terakhir’ (The Last Train) melts into a soup of chemigrammed perforations. A film about the silence that follows the unspeakable; about blurred visions, untold histories and inaccessible archives.
Flame (OT: Polte)
Sami van Ingen, Finland, 2015, 15 min, digital file
A fractured melodrama, based on damaged frames from the last minutes of the only remaining nitrate reel of the lost feature film Silja – Fallen Asleep When Young (1937) directed by Teuvo Tulio. All screening prints and the negative of the film were destroyed in a 1959 studio fire. A sequence from the middle of the film was found at La Cinémathèque Française in Paris in 2015.
The filmmaker is present.
Victory Song
Ieva Balode, Latvia, 2016, 10min, 16 mm
Consisting of found footage of an old Russian Soviet propaganda film “Советский тыл кует победу”, being remade in author's handmade technique, work reflects on memory as a phenomenon which emphasizes the 'unwanted memory 'role in shaping social consciousness of today's society. Film originally was made as a collaborative performance with noise artist Jelena Glazova for an audio-visual event "Parnassius Mnemosyne" in former KGB building in Riga, Latvia. Performance contains 16mm film projection, found 35mm slides and archival footage of 99 death victims of 1941 of KGB terror in Riga Central prison.
Double Exposure
Ingel Vaikla, Estonia, 2020, 13:35 min, digital
Slavutych is a city in northern Ukraine, built in 1986, for the evacuated workers of Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. During the construction of the city, architects and workers from eight soviet republics became involved. Slavutych is the last atomic town, the last ideal city to have been built in Soviet Union. The film reveals the confrontation between the town’s soviet past and its younger generation, contemporary millennials born after the fall of socialism. How does the post soviet youth deal with the present when been surrounded by the remains from the failed past?
The filmmaker is present.
Material Aspects
Paul Kuimet, Estonia, 2020, 10 min, 16 mm
Material Aspects is an essay film that unfolds on the desktop of an unknown collage artist working sometime on the early 21st century. Browsing through various source materials such as archival excerpts, magazines, books and photographs – the history of modernist steel and glass architecture is introduced. The film refers to the paradox Marshall Berman described in the early 1980s: the dystopian glass cities depicted in Soviet science fiction became a reality on the other side of the Iron Curtain under the conditions of the so-called free market economy.
Optical Sound
Mika Taanila, Finland, 2005, 6 min, DCP
Optical Sound combines nocturnal time-lapse footage, miniature surveillance camera images and a musical score photocopied directly onto clear celluloid. The music is a live recording of a dot matrix printer symphony staged at the Avanto Festival at Kiasma Theatre. The recording features only the sound of the printers, with minimal electronic processing.
Hus
Inger Lise Hansen, Norway, USA, 1998, 7min, 16 mm
Hus is a film which attempts to reveal the private and hidden layers of our habitation. It is a live animation film shot on location which incorporates both pixilation (stop motion) and time-lapse photography. Every single shot opens up a hidden layer of the house and exposes it to the passing light. Within the accelerated time of the film the house gradually breaks down piece by piece and frame by frame. Once the house is completely dismantled it is reconstructed in a different location. Hus was shot in the California desert, on the edge of Silicon Valley.
The filmmakers is present.
Lang
Lichun Tseng, Netherlands, 2018, 2:30 min, 16 mm double projection
Different moments disappear and reappear, different moments come together to form a new moment. It is a decomposing and recomposing landscape inspired by the cycle of construction and deconstruction in nature.
film screening.
Tectonic Plate
showing Saturday August 7th 19:00-20:30hTectonic Plate (OT: Mannerlaatta) - Mika Taanila
74 min, DCP, 1:1,85, b&w
Tectonic Plate is a cameraless film about fear of flying, security checks and time zones.After returning from a lengthy business trip to Tokyo, the nameless protagonist is inexplicably stuck at a hotel nearby the Helsinki airport. The events are fixed to the character’s life-style of constant jet lag and multitasking. The use of various technical devices, such as phones, computers and heart rate monitors, slivers his time-management and modifies the consciousness.
The episodes of on-screen texts and of moving image alternate in the narration of this dualistic work.
The techniques used for the moving images are photocopying documents related to air-travel directly onto clear 35mm film and darkroom exposure of objects placed on 35mm reversal film (photograms).
Mika Taanila (FI) is a filmmaker and visual artist. He works with documentaries, experimental film and visual arts. Human engineering, utopias, failures and man-machines are recurring themes in his films and installations. Taanila’s works have been shown at major international group shows, such as Venice Biennale (Nordic Pavilion 2017), Aichi Triennale (2013), and dOCUMENTA (2012).
The filmmaker is present and available for a Q&A after the screening.
film program II
Places and nowhere
Shot in different city landscapes, old factories, power plants, parallel universes, deserts and moon cycles, the films wander around these places of nowhere land and back again.
Curated by Sarah Schipschack
showing Saturday August 7th 17:00-18:30h
Notes from the Underground
Eglė Razumaitė, Lithuania/ France, 2020, 18:30 min, Super 16mm to digital
Through a protagonist’s journey of self-discovery - two cities and the histories of their respective nations becomes contiguous. Paris and Vilnius explore the topic of social and territorial periphery. The film begins by addressing questions that remain central to urban planning and everyday life; how does the city develop, what are the dynamics of its planning, can we speak about certain laws that occur, how do territorial periphery correlate with social separation and what are the historical conditions behind such situations?
The filmmaker is present.
rock/hard place
Roger Beebe, USA, 2005, 5:15min, 16mm
Morro Bay, California is a little coastal tourist town known mostly for the Morro Rock, a volcanic plug that sits at the mouth of the Bay. In all the postcards of Morro Bay, the image is framed so that you can't tell that just beyond the edge of the postcard, maybe a few hundred yards from the Rock, is a gargantuan power plant with 3 towering smoke stacks. This film tries to restore the power plant to the frame, so that we can start thinking about what the juxtaposition of these two massive objects might mean.
Yksi, Kaksi, Kolme
Dagie Brundert, Germany/Finland, 2019, 3min, 8 mm to digital
The last time I traveled the world, I couldn't leave for a long time because the portals were too flat. I had to wait until they got fatter.
And now I'm here. The thing is why I take all these trips: I really want to send a message to my next self, the next Dagie.
I fold the time, I press the spiral down one dimension less, from four to three, then two suddenly collapse and see each other! I don't know if that works and ... oh, now I'm in the supermarket, that's good, because I actually still need a little tube soup, frozen.
Valpi
Richard Tuohy, Australia, 9min, 16m
Valpi makes the audience sit in a carousel. It can be watched with a pulfrich filter over one eye for a depth effect. Use a pair of sunglasses tilted to just cover one eye and you experience the scenery in 3D.
Remnant echo from light and shadow
Lichun Tseng, Netherland, 2020, 18 min, b/w, 16mm
Who is moving? How do we start, continue and end?
It is a search, research, and a process of the unknown and the unconscious; the full and the empty; the momentary and the eternal, which explores the space between the visible and invisible in reflection and connection.
Tåke
Inger Lise Hansen, Norway, 2018, 15 min, 16mm & 2K & Super 16mm & Super 8mm
TÅKE observes the spectacle of fog through several different film- and video formats. The film explores the behaviour of Super-8 and 16mm film alongside digital video against a visual obstacle. The imagery is recorded on location in Oslo, Azores, Beijing and Newfoundland.
In parallel to the image the soundtrack attempts to create an auditory fog. It compares the loss of visibility to the loss of audible frequencies. The soundtrack is composed of sirens, signals and hearing tests samples.
The filmmaker is present.
The desert remembers it was an ocean
Thorbjorg Jonsdottir, Iceland, 4:20 min, 16mm
A labyrinth without walls, full of pathways where living beings get lost. Time is fluid here, and traces of humans and animals indicate the right course as well as the wrong one. A field of sand that was once an ocean.
The filmmaker is present.
Lunar Almanac
Malena Szlam, Canada, 2013, 4 min, silent, 16m
Lunar Almanac traces the observational points of the lunar cycle in a series of visual notations. Using single-frame and long-exposure photography, the unaltered, in-camera editing accumulates over 4000 layered field views of half-moons, new moons, and full moons. These lunar inscriptions flit across the screen with a frenetic energy, illuminating nocturnal reveries that pull at the tides as much as our dreams.
© 2021