ALT/KINO is covering this year’s online iteration of 25FPS via a series of correspondences between Patrick Gamble and Ben Nicholson about programmes in the festival’s competition strand. First up, Patrick reports back on the opening programme, ‘Escapes.’
The End of Suffering (a proposal) (Jacqueline Lentzou, 2020)
Dear Ben,
I’m glad you are covering this year’s edition of 25FPS International Experimental Film and Video Festival with me. Of all the festivals I’ve been unable to attend due to the Coronavirus pandemic, this is the one I’ve missed the most. Zagreb is a wonderful city, and 25FPS routinely programs work that aims to rigorously re-evaluate the conventional structures of filmmaking. I left last year's festival feeling energised and inspired, so even though we can’t be in Croatia, it’s nice we’re able to experience this year’s event remotely.
The festival opened on Thursday 24th September at Zagreb’s Student Centre with ‘Escapes,’ the first of its 5 competition sections. You mentioned Jacqueline Lentzou’s The End of Suffering (a proposal) was a highlight of the program, but the moment the film started with John Maus’ Believer I was hooked. The film deals with solitude and abandonment (topical themes right now) and follows a young woman named Sofia, who finds herself engaged in an interplanetary dialogue with the universe after suffering a sudden and unexplainable panic attack. The film’s playful tête-à-tête across the solar system reminded me of David O'Reilly’s video game Everything (another recommendation from yourself), in which the player endlessly switches from the perspectives of different objects and species until the boundary between “subject” and “other” becomes blurred and irrelevant. In Everything, the game-play is interspersed with snippets of a lecture by British philosopher Alan Watts who discusses the interconnectivity of all things. However, here the narrator is the planet Mars, who frequently berates Sofia for her habit of trying to understand everything. At one point she is told “we are all nothing but fallen flowers", a statement that resonated as both depressingly relevant and achingly poetic during these unprecedented times.
I’m normally quite an introverted person, so unlike Sofia, I thought I’d be well equipped for this period of enforced solitude. Time to finally read all those books, or crack on with those short story ideas; but instead I’ve found my attention span dwindling and my drive to do anything remotely constructive vanish entirely. It’s like being caught in a vortex where everything is possible but nothing actually happens. It’s a sensation not dissimilar to watching Siegfried A. Fruhauf’s Thorax. Described as a ‘cinematic wormhole’ that explores the history of film and perception, I’m uncertain of the processes Fruhauf used to create this spellbinding effect, but it’s an intoxicating trip. An experience I can only describe as an expansion of Kubrick’s “beyond the infinite” scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey. A stream of endless movement and alternating colours, glimpses of organic matter like a human eye, or a beating heart slowly emerge as sound and light waves vibrate in an overflowing and overwhelming communion. Is there a ghost in the machine? Is Fruhauf exploring humanity’s response to technological change? Or is this an abstract portrait of how flesh and machinery become inextricably entwined during the process of filmmaking? Perhaps it’s all three.
Since I’ve struggled to find much solace in books or films during lockdown I, like many others, have turned to video games. We’ve had a few Whatsapp conversations during the pandemic about the games we’ve played, and I know you’re a fan of Machinima, so I think you might enjoy Total Refusal’s How to Disappear. Described as ‘an anti-war film in the truest sense of the word’ the film employs the graphics engine of Battlefield V, a popular first-person-shooter, to illustrate its essay on the ethics of military desertion. Despite the obvious link between wargame violence and real-world realities, the film takes a surprisingly light approach to a serious topic, creating an engaging meditation on the philosophical, and social aspects of desertion. Using the game’s hyperreal graphics, Total Refusal cleverly explore the strange borderland of gaming fantasy and reality; a space where the players' intrinsic desire to fight is championed and desertion not only discouraged but almost impossible to perform; with the game preventing you from being able to drop your gun or flee the battle arena. By disrupting Battlefield’s intended style of play and exposing the limitations of the in-game apparatus, the film provides a chilling insight into humanity’s own unquestioning acceptance of the restrictions imposed within their own environment.
Providing a much-needed escape from the real world, I’m thankful for this opportunity to experience these films from afar. I hope you have a similarly fulfilling experience and look forward to reading your thoughts across the next few days.
Best,
Patrick
The 2020 edition of 25FPS Festival ran from 24 - 27 September
Patrick Gamble is a writer on film and culture, whose work has featured on Hyperallergic, BFI, Calvert Journal and Kinoscope. Further links to his writing can be found at patrickgamble.contently.com.