INDEPENDENT FILM SHOW 10th EDITION
10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14 november 2010
Fondazione Morra
Palazzo Ruffo di Bagnara Piazza Dante 89 Napoli
A Gaze From Within by Masha Godovannaya
Films of the Sea 1st part by Mark Webber
Films of the Sea 2nd part by Mark Webber
The Sublime is Now! by Jeanne Liotta
Bruce Baillie, the mystic of Canyon Cinema by Mario Franco
Hellivision - Short films by Ian Helliwell
Double Exposure by Thomas Draschan & Bernhard Schreiner
This year, E-M ARTS celebrates ten years of the Independent Film Show: an adventure grown in Naples, that is unique in its genre, highly refined, and very labour-intensive. Above all, it is careful to balance projectual rigour with educational and informational aims. Today an event dedicated to Independent Cinema is more necessary than ever in Italy, in Naples. This program leaves nothing to chance, clarifies misunderstandings and draws up a map of its subject. The projects on show go over and above simple readings, anecdotes about the works and their makers’ lives, the commonplaces of the age in which they are being shown. Instead they privilege an examination of the aesthetic attitude, ever-changing, and as well as that, they focus on research, exploration, creation and re-creation. The Independent Film Show, moving under the sign of this conviction, gives voice to film-makers and curators of each section of the five evenings - suggesting the way of getting close to each single performance. To discover meaning and value, comprehend technique and form, to find simple answers to complex questions, to avoid the affliction of lazy stereotypes. To render, that is, familiar a world which if on the one hand fascinates with the dizzying weave of connections it presents, on the other disconcerts because of its immanent intrinsic complexity. The programmes come out as the unforeseen result, yet not by chance, of the poetic research of so many voices which, through their eclectic trajectories push over and above what has already been seen, of the predictable, of the possible.
The Independent Film Show 10th edition, coordinated by Raffaella Morra, under the patronage of Regione Campania and with the support of Metropolitana di Napoli, will take place from the 10th till the 14th of November 2010 at the Fondazione Morra (Palazzo Ruffo di Bagnara, Piazza Dante 89).
For this tenth edition, the event unwaveringly continues to dedicate itself to the uncovering of Experimental Cinema. There is another chance to see some of the masterpieces of the genre, but above all the audience will have the chance to experience some of the most interesting film and video makers of the 21st Century.
In the programme A Gaze From Within, Masha Godovannaya has chosen some videos made over the last seven years by artists living in a post-Perestroika Russia. These works all take a careful look at the economic and political situation, in which sharp contrasts and social abuses are still-now badly concealed by the ever-present hand of the government.
The sea is the inspirational element in Films of the Sea, curated by Mark Webber. The first part consists of Peter Hutton’s full-length At Sea, a film which reflects on the huge implications of the environmental impact caused by the brutality of consumerism, and the film What the water said by David Gatten, in which it is the ocean and its inhabitants who make the film. The second part picks up with Maya Deren’s At Land (defined by Deren herself as a ‘mythological journey through the 20th Century’) and it goes through Matthias Müller’s erotic fantasies, Janie Geiser’s imaginary childhood battles, the journey of an immigrant from Africa to Europe told by Mati Diop, and the vicissitudes of sailors around the American coasts, explored by Rebecca Meyers.
The Sublime is Now! is a selection of films and videos made by Jeanne Liotta, an American artist who, taking up Ralph Waldo Emerson’s theories, intersects art, science and natural philosophy in her complex Science Project. The double 16mm projection of the film One day this may no longer exist (2005) is done by the artist herself, transporting the viewer inside the filmic material which captures the fleeting moment of an alignment of the planets.
The programme Bruce Baillie, the mystic of Canyon Cinema, curated by Mario Franco explores a small section of Baillie’s spectacular filmography. These films, projected in their original 16mm format, are characterised by a tendency to combine and layer multiple images as well as the subjective and unusual use of light. For Baillie, making a film is a cine-spiritual research, a mythological universe made up of surfaces and spirituality, open to perception and intellectual analysis, but which often leaves it seeming a madman - a ‘pure fool’ as Wagner called him - such as Parsifal or Don Quixote.
Ian Helliwell presents Hellivision - short films, a wide panorama which stretches from the abstraction, the found footage, and the animation, where the synthesis between image and sound takes on a fundamental value, transforming the filmic material into an acoustic mode of expression. This intense way of working has led him to create, through ‘creative soldering’ techniques and a knack for electronics, his own acoustical instruments, named Hellitrons and Hellisizers (a tone generator and an analogue synthesizer, respectively).
In Double Exposure, Thomas Draschan and Bernhard Schreiner pay homage to the German film-maker Thomas Feldmann. In his brief career Feldmann left some intense, radical films, such as the unfinished Double Exposure. The programme continues with the films of Thomas Draschan and Bernhard Schreiner, characterised by a complex, extremely rapid editing technique, which results in highly personal works: sensitive, dreamlike found footage - in Thomas’ work - often connected to a reflection on the role of the human in the cosmos, while Bernhard makes poetic films based on in-depth musical research and the variations of light.
On Friday, 12 November at 6:00pm, there will be also the presentation of the book Cinema come Poesia. Capitoli sui Bordi di un’Immagine (Cinema as Poetry. Chapters on the edge of an image) by Tommaso Pomilio (ed. Zona, 2010), with the participation of Lorenzo Esposito, Gabriele Frasca and Donatello Fumarola, followed by the projection/performance of Ajenk, a video-poem by Jonida Prifti (editing and image processing by Andreina Noce).