This newsletter is returning
what year is this?
Hi there. Have not sent anything out in a while, would like to start doing so again and I’m sending this out largely to force my hand in to doing so on a more regular basis. Below are some short thoughts on a few films seen at Fracto Film Encounter in Berlin last October. Unfortunately I missed the first selection programme and the Found Footage in Finnish Experimental Film sessions, but was lucky enough to attend the four other selection screenings; all of which which were excellently curated, with thought and sensitivity as to engaging connections and oppositions. It was especially joyous to see so many films projected on Super8 and 16mm.
Tugging Diary (Yan Wai Yin, 2021)
Opening the Urban ecologies programme was this digital work from Hong Kong filmmaker Yan Wai Yin, with a collage like approach comprising analogue photography, digital footage and other media. Standing out from the analogue works filling the rest of the programme, it was by far the strongest; wrestling with ideas of place, community and political action in the in the borderlands between off and online. A portrait of a footbridge as a vector for the political struggle in Hong-Kong over an eighteen month period; sources - visual, textual, verbal - depict the communal and radical potential of infrastructure and ‘non-places’. The structure of the bridge becomes a locale where text is written, edited, overwritten and erased. Through these evolutions, and oppositions, the non-place is revealed as a zone in which an individual has the opportunity to escape from a governed and monitored identity - maintained by systems of ownership, either of property or labor time - and in a space that is, in essence, communal regains an ability to truly express identity amongst the crowd. The promise of such a space, and the continuous cycle of transformation and surface erasure sees the footbridge become a parallel and counterpoint for online sites of communication, organisation and protest. Between the text appearing inside the image, as subtitled text over the image and the contrasting text in the audio channel; the inscribing, reading and engagement of text is depicted as not a passive singular action but a moment of effect and change for the reader and text itself. An experience that speaks to the physical experience of the footbridge as a space where one becomes an active participant in this constant flow of transformation, that can be erased and covered, but not disappeared.
Of This Beguiling Membrane (Charlotte Pryce, 2021)
Not exactly ambiguous, but a delicacy of execution nonetheless. Pryce uses a text from Robert Kirk’s The Secret Commonwealth, in a fashion more illustrative than dialectic, to evoke an early/pre-modern folkloric conception of cinema existing in mirrors, screens and illusions: luminescence and reflected surfaces presenting the see-er with the appearance of a world, a space, an other. Rather than an innocent pleasure, to be entranced by the lure of the screen is a dangerous action, a submission to an erotic desire, in which one risks (and wants) the borders of the self to become undefined.
We are drawn into two pairings, or divides, that the voyeur transgresses; between themselves and the natural world, and between an other-self that emerges in the reflection. In both cases an exchange of identity occurs between the viewer and the viewed (and of course the film-viewer). This shifting of self is most affectingly embodied in the pond skaters, whose life of patient presence atop an image makes them an easy surrogate for the cinema dweller. Yet their appearance also suggests the existence and nod to a particular history of experimental film in these creatures; who are still there, waiting, whenever a camera is turned to the ruptured swoon of that other world.
Katoaminen (Vanishing) (Mika Taanila, 2020)
Taanila has washed a home-viewing super8 print of the The Invisible Man (1933) in commercial bleach, erasing the majority of the image, leaving only a textured distortion in the light-void, some sparse glimpses of the image and the reels’ magnetic sound. The bulb in the projector was fairly orange, but the reel would take on a much whiter appearance in projections with a newer bulb. There’s a Nigel Blackwell-esque quality to this ‘one joke, perfectly executed’, and I found simple pleasures in being able to hear but not see whatever commotion the invisible man is causing, and at the exclamation of “he’s mad! and he’s invisible!”. While the erosions of time and use tend to effect sound and image somewhat in parallel, here we have the complete preservation of sound against, not a total negation of image, but, a knowledge of an image’s former presence. If this ghost-image remains to haunt the reel, does the tension between sound and image remain the same: are we still seeing the words? are we still hearing the image?
Presented at a festival that also included two Peter Tscherkassky sessions, my respect for the wry heart of Taanila’s film, and it’s tenderness for the vulnerability of celluloid, only heightened against the work of the former; whose work despite its technical accomplishments, offers me little original thought, and even less space for reflection.
Some other favourites from Fracto, in no particular order: Ceniza Verde (Green Ash) (Pablo Mazzolo, 2019), Bethanien Tetralogie (Deborah S. Phillips, 2021), Excerpts I [though I now depart...] (Jorge Suárez-Quiñones Rivas, 2021), Flowers blooming in our throats (Eve Giolo, 2020).
I’m so goddam tired, but grateful to have been finding a little more time and space to write recently. I’m really hoping to send stuff on a more frequent (might not be regular) basis.
Other things I’ve been enjoying : this Holderlin poem, this Padang Food Tigers album, this Stephen Gill photo, this programme for a 1982 NYC Straub-Huillet retro.
Anyway, all the best
James
