WHAT FUTURE?
SHORT FILM PROGRAMME
SUNDAY 17 APRIL
10.00am – 11.25am
Curated and presented by Emmanuel Lefrant, Director of Light Cone a worldwide distributor of experimental and artists’ film.
In newspapers and scientific articles we often read about the current ecological phenomenon as an environmental crisis. But the use of the word ‘crisis’ implies that we are going through something serious — but not that it is critical. It is something temporary, something we will get over, as we have in the past with all the other crises. Yet, according to the French philosopher Bruno Latour, the truth is that climate change will cause our civilisation to collapse.
Through a series of films, this program will explore how experimental filmmakers approach this question (dealing with subjects as diverse as nuclear power, the ‘5th animal extinction’, the problem of waste processing or, more globally, the Anthropocene), only to discover viewpoints that are hardly more optimistic than the aforementioned philosopher…
LANDFILL 16
Jennifer Reeves / USA / 2011 / 9m
Exhumed 16mm film from my own “landfill” in Indiana, constitute the canvas of LANDFILL 16. After finishing my double-projection WHEN IT WAS BLUE I was horrified by the bulk of outtakes that would normally end up in a landfill. So I temporarily buried the footage to let enzymes in the soil begin to decompose the image, and later I hand-painted that film to give it new life. Within this pulsating, abstract moving painting I attempt to express my dread of man-made waste. This “recycling” is a meditation on nature’s losing battle to decompose relics of our abandoned technologies and productions.
QUIET ZONE
Karl Lemieux / Canada / 2014 / 14m
In Quiet Zone, the filmmakers take us deep into the world of those who suffer from electromagnetic hypersensitivity. These “wave refugees” settled in West Virginia around the Green Bank observatory, in an area known as the National Radio Quiet Zone. Combining elements of documentary, film essay and experimental film, Quiet Zone defies genres, weaving together an unusual story in which sound and image distort reality to make the distress and suffering of these people palpable. Through the use of complex imagery and sound, mind-blowing cinematic moments are born – moments of grace during which viewers witness electromagnetic waves take shape in the environment, travel through walls and invade spaces with their powerful vibrations. Known for their work in the musical group Godspeed You! Black Emperor, David Bryant and Karl Lemieux produced a striking piece of sensory genius.
PREMIÈRE FRACTION
Guillaume Mazloum / France / 2015 / 5m
“This is how one perishes through absurdity!” Taken from “Instructions pour une prise d’armes” by Auguste Blanqui. Fractions is a seven films series. Seven sequences, each with a pattern and a reference to a text of a political nature, to create a space for reflexion on the scope and responsibility of these images.
TRANSAENSION
Dan Baker / USA / 2006 / 6m
Out of a sick morass of reds and yellows, blacks, burns, and direct-to-film scratches, arises the (post) post-industrial terror of our collective oil-stained subconscious.
OIL WELLS : STURGEON ROAD & 97TH STREET
Christina Battle / Canada / 2002 / 3m
Highlighting the repetitive nature of oil wells in Northern Alberta, this hand processed film documents a sighting common to the Canadian Prairies.
Christina Battle’s Oil Wells: Sturgeon Road & 97th Street (2003) hand-manipulates 16mm footage of oil fields on the Canadian prairies, simultaneously managing to recall Cécile Fontaine’s delicacy of emulsion-layering techniques, pay visual homage to Pat O’Neill’s early 7362 (1967), and evoke with marvellous understatement, the grand prize at the heart of the imperialist resource wars. [senses of cinema “Been Underground So Long, It Looks Like Up to Me: New York Underground Film Festival 2004” – report by Ioannis Mookas (review of programme: ‘patriot games’ – nyuff 2004)]
Shot in the artist’s home province of Alberta, the mechanical rising and falling of an oil well is subject to a suite of rephotography applications (recoloured, superimposed, speed changes). Views of far and near are juxtaposed. Theme and variations, not with a piano, but an oil derrick on a prairie field, rising and falling. [Mike Hoolboom, 2007]
LE PAYS DÉVASTÉ
Emmanuel Lefrant / France / 2015 / 11m 30s
What do you see? – A place not suited for human being. Le Pays Dévasté relates to the Anthropocene, the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment.
A FILM RECLAIMED
Ana Vaz & Tristan Bera / Brazil / 2015 / 20m
The ecologic crisis is a political, economic and social crisis. It is also cinematographic, as cinema coincides historically and in a critical and descriptive way with the development of the Anthropocene. A Film Reclaimed is a conversation, an essay that reads the terrestrial crisis under the influence and with the help of the beautiful and terrible films which have accompanied it.
Tickets: £4
MAIN AUDITORIUM, HEART OF HAWICK – TOWER MILL
