PROGRAM / 3
»Thresholds«
42min / 20th May / Screenings / ACUD Cinema
20:20-21:00h
At once material and specter, neither present nor absent, the ghostly flesh of the film image embodies a twofold movement of a fleeting (dis)appearance. It fractures conceptions of temporality. It bears witness to the haunting of an already absent presence and to the insisting notion of the invisible. The afterlife of ephemeral traces, resurrected but not redeemed, a glimpse of the unknown, a look beyond the material word, a tension between the explicit and the latent. An instance where past and present are intermingled. This allegory of the cinematic experience, on the threshold between the visible and the invisible, will eventually dissolve into the darkness of the movie theatre in the course of the projection of a black 35mm print.
Aura of Uncertainty
Ryan Marino
6 min / 2016 / USA / World premiere
»Ominous passages of time and light provide a fleeting glimpse into the unknown.
An exploration of the mystery film that investigates the atmospheric and the ominous. Composed of the peripheral moments that often surround or seek to complement the action of a traditional narrative, the film builds upon an overall sense of uncertainty while exploring the perceptions of a mystery told in light and tone.«
Half Human, Half Vapor
Mike Stoltz
11 min / 2015 / USA / Berlin premiere
»This project began out of a fascination with a giant sculpture of a dragon attached to a Central Florida mansion. The property had recently been left to rot, held in lien by a bank. Hurricanes washed away the sculpture.
I learned about the artist who created this landmark, Lewis Vandercar (1913-1988), who began as a painter. His practice grew along with his notoriety for spell-casting and telepathy.
Inspired by Vandercar’s interest in parallel possibility, I combined these images with text from local newspaper articles in a haunted-house film that both engages with and looks beyond the material world.«
Answer print
Mónica Savirón
5 min / 2016 / USA / German premiere
»The fading that devastates color films occurs in the dark. It is accelerated by high temperatures and, to a lesser extent, relative humidity. Dye fading is irreversible. Once the dye images have faded, the information lost cannot be recovered«—Image Permanence Institute
»An answer print is the first film after the original has been timed for every shot with fades and dissolves if any. The question that it answers is ‘what is this going to look like’, and ‘what corrections, if any, are needed« — Bill Brand
Answer Print is made with deteriorated 16mm color stock, and it is meant to disappear over time. Neither hue nor sound has been manipulated in its analog reassembling. The soundtrack combines audio generated by silent double perforated celluloid, the optical tracks from sound films, and the tones produced by each of the filmmaker’s cuts when read by the projector. The shots are based on a 26-frame length: the distance in 16mm films with optical tracks between an image and its sound.
From Poems of Home, by John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892):
»...Slow tracing down the thickening sky
Its mute and ominous prophecy,
A portent seeming less than threat,
It sank from sight before it set.«
River in Castle
Sandy Ding
4 min / 2016 / Croatia, China / German premiere
»The "River" is symbolized emotion and the "Castle" is symbolized crisis, distinction, and liberation. When the film liberates its original contact by physically weaving it and printing through dense chemistry, the malted lights speaks this transformation.
The film was discovered from some leftovers in the lab (Klubvizija, Croatia). Though reprinting it with a DIY printing foundation, the lights behind this small section poured out of its frames and expressed symbolic meanings.«
Out There In The Dark
Gregg Biermann
4 min / 2016 / USA / German premiere
The final scene of Billy Wilder's classic film Sunset Boulevard is superimposed over itself and offset in time.
The Tragic Bulb
Guillaume Vallée
6 min / 2016 / Canada / Berlin premiere
»Ephemeral traces of nothingness. Rotoscoping farmers, scrumbling churches, dying memories as hand-painted layers, decay & collage on film emulsion as incidental traces of nothingness. A work that is aware of his own mechanism.«
Black
Anouk De Clercq
5 min / 2015 / Belgium / German premiere
Simultaneously boundless and intimate, collective and personal. An ode to and an example of a cinematic experience that is becoming increasingly rare, the darkness of a movie theatre in the course of the projection of a 35 mm film print.