Programmed by Michèle Smith
“Like Laurel and Hardy, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Bouvard and Pecuchet, Rat and Bear!" Stefan Zweifel, Flowers and Questions, 2006.
Dressed in rented animal costumes, internationally acclaimed multimedia artists Fischli and Weiss, "the merry pranksters of contemporary art" (The New York Times), take their characters "rat" and "bear" on a string of adventures that pose serious questions about art, crime, nature, and the meaning of life. Their first film, a Chandleresque crime drama, begins with them stumbling upon a corpse in a Los Angeles art gallery. Hoping it will be their key to fame and fortune, they take it with them, only to find their plans spiraling out of control. “The result is more reminiscent of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction watched after a dose of psilocybin mushrooms” (Lauren O’Neill Butler, ArtForum). In the sequel, rat and bear’s philosophical debates and fractious relationship are tested against the majestic backdrop of the Swiss Alps, as they find themselves at the mercy of nature, once again grappling to understand the seeming chaos of the world. "In the epic style of an age-old tale, the film traces the path to understanding: the profound, melancholy, but also the comic realization that every "right way" is also a wrong way (and every wrong way also a right way)" (Patrick Frey, Parkett Magazine).
Image: The Point of Least Resistance. Courtesy of Icarus Films and Sprüth Magers Berlin
Programmed by Michèle Smith
Ute Aurand’s trilogy of films Toying with String I-III (Fadenspiele I-III) was made in a spirit of artistic spontaneity and improvisation with her sister, the painter Detel Aurand, between 1999 and 2013. Filmed inside the artist’s studio and outdoors in forests, fields, and mountains, they feature various natural and manmade materials invisibly manipulated to create images in a constant state of metamorphosis. This aspect of the sisters’ films serves as a bridge to the work of local artists Julia Feyrer and Tamara Henderson, who will show a selection of 16mm films from their collaborative and separate practices.
Programmed by Michèle Smith
Programmed by Michèle Smith
Using abstraction, animation, and re-enactments, Toronto-based artist Jean-Paul Kelly — the 2014 recipient of the Kazuko Trust Award for “artistic excellence in the moving image” at the New York Film Festival — has created a powerful series of short videos that examine the attractors and repulsors of various forms of media representation. Details from documentaries, press cuttings, publications, and online media streams are isolated, superimposed, composited, and otherwise reconfigured into new meanings — often in disturbing pairings of pleasure and pain, desire and trauma. The centrepiece of the program, Service of the goods, is a shot-by-shot reproduction of scenes from Frederick Wiseman documentaries, stripped of their naturalistic signifiers to bring underlying ideologies into sharper focus. “This film is not only a bang-on piece of filmic analysis; it also poses fundamental questions about the representation of social institutions, and those stuck inside of them” (Michael Sicinski, Keyframe Magazine).
(Near) extinct technologies make sound visible in this program of shorts delving into ideas of knowledge, memory, and communication. On a Chladni Plate, a device that marked the birth of acoustics, grains of sand, moving like Busby Berkeley dancers, form intricate patterns in response to changing sound frequencies, their shapes recalling the utopian quest for a “pure,” onomatopoeic alphabet. Wax cylinder recordings combine with modern scientific instruments to animate a text by Rainer Maria Rilke on the possibility of hearing the dead by playing their skulls with a gramophone needle. A histrionic voice-over, translated into a wave of small flames on a Ruben’s Tube, provokes unexpected associations, from the biblical burning bush to various acts of ventriloquism in pop culture. Hand-drawn compositions by electronic music pioneer Daphne Oram are run through her radical invention, the Oramics Machine. Kaleidoscopic effects in the lamphouse of a 35mm-film printer honour Natalie Kalmus, colour consultant on masterpieces of the Technicolor era. The eyes of the George Eastman family and early Hollywood stars reveal chromatic distortions in some early colour film tests. And in a dramatic finale, Satz and experimental filmmaker Lis Rhodes encode their voices as abstract light patterns on 16mm mono and 35mm stereo filmstrips in a collaborative exploration of sound-image synchronicity.
LIVE SHOW!
Programmed by Michèle Smith
The scenario for a revolution must be written in the manner of a film script -- JRA manifesto, 1995.
While in Japan researching extreme leftist groups gone underground, the French artist Eric Baudelaire struck a deal with Masao Adachi, the renegade director/screenwriter who had abandoned filmmaking in the 1970s to join the Japanese Red Army in Lebanon and fight in the Palestinian cause. In return for his story, Adachi asked Baudelaire to shoot scenes for him in Beirut based on his cinematic theory of landscape, fukeiron. In return for this super-8 footage, Baudelaire asked Adachi to write a script, a semi-autobiographical fiction, to be made after the completion of The Anabasis, Baudelaire’s dark and suspenseful documentary about the JRA. “Anabasis” is the name given, since Xenophon, to a soldier's journey into the unknown and the return home in a changed state. The new screenplay, about a group of former Palestinian militants haunted by their pasts, would be the protocol for constructing a film, The Ugly One, on memory, revolution, and cinema, seemingly written and rehearsed before our eyes.
Programmed by Michèle Smith
Programmed by Michèle Smith
“I thought I was Leni Riefenstahl. It was due perhaps to editing Trudeau. Would he be a good leader? Or just a politician? Irony came wandering in, in the porn of applause for his statement ‘Reason over passion, that is the theme of all my writing.’ It should be reason and passion in a person.” JOYCE WIELAND