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. Here, Ben responds to Patrick, and discusses the ‘Frames’ programme.
A Proposal to project in Scope (Victoria Schmid, 2020)
Dear Patrick,
Great to get your first piece of correspondence from 25 FPS and after hearing you enthuse about the line-up last year, it’s great to be watching and discussing with you this year. It’s been a festival that I’ve admired from afar and – as you suggested in your reflection on the opening programme – I am a fan of Jacqueline Lentzou’s The End of Suffering (a proposal) and was delighted to see it kicking things off. A revisit was highly appreciated and was even more struck on this occasion by how much is portrayed in the film’s opening few shots. When Mars first describes the protagonist’s ‘desperation,’ I marvelled at how potently and succinctly that state of mind had already been conveyed. I hadn’t considered the film’s connection to Everything before, so thanks for that! It was interesting to recall that the moment in that game that I found the most overwhelming and profound was the first time I “became” a universe, which ties in visually and narratively with Lentzou’s film.
I was also glad to catch How to Disappear on your recommendation and you were right, it very much appealed to my interests. I was reminded of Michael Crowe’s An Attempt at Exhausting A Place in GTA Online – a book in which the author sought to transpose Georges Perec’s famous philosophical exercise into the world of online gaming – and the active subversion of Leonhard Müllner’s short Operation Janewalk which took a pacifist walking tour through a digital shooter. I also loved Nina Yuen’s Evelyn which I won’t dwell on as you didn’t pick it out in your round-up, but it felt like a strong opening programme overall.
Another film from ‘Escapes’ that you didn’t feature in your message was Antoinette Zwirchmayr’s Seismic Form, which I was lukewarm on but I found it springing to mind during the opening shots of Victoria Schmid’s A Proposal to project in Scope as I was tracing the contours of the landscape and the undulations of the waves. The shot of the ocean made me think of the visual aspect of Michael Snow’s Waivelength and, funnily enough, I later noticed that Snow is name-checked in the festival blurb on Schmid’s film, in reference to their differing approaches to understanding the representation of landscape on screen. Schmid constructs a widescreen in the natural landscape and across the course of her 8-minute film examines the play of light and image upon it. As I watched the shadow of a palm tree encroach onto the blank canvas, I found myself thinking of the work of May Adadol Ingawanij and ‘Animistic Apparatus’ which explores the practice of cinematic projection for non-human audiences. Suddenly the effect of sunlight on a plane becomes projection on a screen and the dappled shade in a forest is transformed into a beautiful abstract moment of wild cinema unconcerned with a human audience.
Schmid’s intervention is one of providing the frame through to view these moments – both in the form of the physical screen and by capturing the effect for us – and there is a similar desire at the heart of Philipp Fleischmann’s silent structuralist work, the entrancing Austrian Pavilion. I remember hearing about the film when it premiered at TIFF last year and subsequently read Jordan Cronk’s interview with the filmmaker in Film Comment, in which he talks about the Austrian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale as ‘a machine that directs, navigates, and shapes light—a little bit like a film camera.’ As with Schmid’s film, Fleischmann’s intervention is one of capturing the interaction of light in the existing architectural landscape, though in this case it is transmitted via a spectacular custom-built camera (there’s a picture of it in the Film Comment interview). Fleischmann’s films also have an underlying political concern regarding the decisions about what should be exhibited in spaces such as the Austrian Pavilion at Venice, and the limiting of artistic vision by the very nature of the commercial film camera – in imposing frames onto the frameless celluloid.
Where Austrian Pavilion is merely the result of Fleischmann’s experiment – with the additional context available outside the film itself – TESTFILM #1, made by Telcosystems, acts as an account of such an intervention. In this case, where Fleischmann challenges the limitations imposed on experimental film by a camera and an exhibition space, Telcosystems challenge the medium of digital cinema projection, the DCP. Their experiment engages with the impossibility of an artist feeding a non-regulation file into to the projector in the way Fleischmann does, a situation in which the DCP fails completely. Instead, they experiment by inserting interferences into the digital projector, using the likes of magnates to distort and reshape to produce so colourful abstractions. Of course, in the corporate landscape of modern digital cinemas, artists do not typically have access to the delivery method to attempt such radical intervention and must find new forms of medium-specific experimentation.
Best,
Ben
The 2020 edition of 25FPS Festival ran from 24 - 27 September